


Et in Arcadia ego

by ScrimshawPen



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Family, Gen, Growing Up, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-04
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-05-02 06:04:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14538273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScrimshawPen/pseuds/ScrimshawPen
Summary: Even after the oil rig was destroyed, the Enclave remained a threat and no one else would feel safe until they were wiped out to the last man. To a boy born at Navarro, however, they represented the only home and family he knew. Introducing Israel, Miriam, and a young Arcade Gannon, this story is set on the periphery of Fallout 2 and its aftermath. Rated T for language and violence.





	1. Why Is This Night Different?

**AN: A disclaimer: I don't own Fallout and I'm not making money off of my writing.**

**Another disclaimer: for anybody reading one of my stories for the first time, I've already put a lot of thought into developing Arcade Gannon's identity and back-story. One thing that I've always been sure of is that he is ethnically Jewish. This heritage fits aspects of his worldview and family dynamic that I intend to explore here; it also explains why his middle name is given in canon as "Israel."**

**However, I can't write a story about an sinister shadow-government hiding in America's ashes starring Jewish characters without first issuing a strong repudiation of the real-life brand of anti-semitism that uses conspiracy theories to threaten and endanger people in the present day. The Enclave preserved the worst of pre-war American ideology - the superiority complex, the xenophobia and isolationism, the might-makes-right militarism - but that has nothing to do with the incidental ethnic or religious identities of the characters in this story. I have nothing but respect for these.**

**I'm also not trying to do convoluted apologetics on the Enclave's behalf in this story. Without excusing what they did - and tried to do - I want to further explore what Fallout: New Vegas did so well with the Remnants: made the individual soldiers of a despised cause sympathetic and human, instead of just cannon-fodder for a cartoonishly evil faction.**

**That's all I have to say. Thanks for reading!**

**-ScrimshawPen**

* * *

_Why is this night different from all other nights?_

_On all other nights we eat leavened products and matzah, and on this night only matzah._

_On all other nights we eat all vegetables, and on this night only bitter herbs._

_On all other nights, we don't dip our food even once, and on this night we dip twice._

_On all other nights we eat sitting or reclining, and on this night we only recline._

-"The Four Questions" of the Passover Seder

* * *

_April 21, 2247, Navarro Army Base_

" _Mah nit-... ma nishtanah… hala… ha-lailah… ha-zeh m-m-mi-kol_ … um…" He'd lost his place and squinted at the lines of transliterated text, finding the next word after just a few seconds. The only other child at the table interrupted him before he could begin again, his mocking tone breaking his concentration again.

"It's ' _Mah nishtanah ha-lailah ha-zeh mikol ha-lailot_ ,' idiot. Mom, why does  _he_  get to ask the questions? Little squirt can't even read yet." Stanley Carrington was nine years old and insufferably superior. Arcade often wished that his parents were not friends with Stanley's parents: the older boy could be a bully, and always liked to remind Arcade that he was better than him at  _everything_.

"Can  _so_." It wasn't Stanley's turn to read the questions, and he knew it. That honor went to the youngest child by tradition. He set down the prayer book with a scowl, careful not to damage the ancient binding despite his childish anger. "I  _can_  read now. These words are funny, that's all."

"It's  _Hebrew_ , moron."

"Stanley-" Rachel Carrington began reprovingly, but fell silent when her husband made an abrupt gesture. An imposing bear of a man with a temper to match, he laid a heavy, work-roughened hand on his son's shoulder, squeezing it hard. If it hurt, the boy had the sense not to say anything, but only hung his head, biting his lip in subdued frustration.

"Go on, Arcade," Miriam Gannon whispered, cupping a gentle hand over his small one. "You're doing fine, my love."

The adults in the room were on edge, and some of their tension had settled upon the children as well, making them quarrelsome. This Seder service was not like the other holiday meals the Gannons had shared with the only other practicing Jewish family on base. For one thing, Israel Gannon was absent, out on yet another patrol of their shrinking borders. For another, in between the liturgical reflections upon their ancestors' flight, there was subdued talk of a mass exodus of their own, of abandoning this base for an uncertain future. No one knew where they would all be a year from now.

With his formal role over, Arcade was bored and sleepy, uncomfortably full but still picking at the rich food in front of him. The meat, the haunch of a young bighorner (closest thing to lamb they could find), was good. He also liked the flatbread and the bitter herbs, and ate as much as he could of the sweet paste called  _charoset_ , made of fruit and nuts. He did not, however, like his small glass of watered wine, even though he'd begged to be allowed to taste it this year. It was too sour and it made his head feel funny. The adults' conversation was low, anxious, and confusing, and went on and on for what seemed like hours. Nobody paid attention to him, and he and Stanley started accidentally-on-purpose kicking each other under the table until they were sternly lectured and excused to play.

Once he was free to explore, Arcade found the  _afikoman_ , the hidden piece of matzah, beneath the living room rug. Whichever child returned the broken piece of bread to the table would receive a reward. Pleased at his success, he nevertheless forfeited it to the older, stronger Stanley without a fight. Arcade was small, nearsighted, and timid, and didn't care enough about the prize to raise another fuss with the adults.

He left Stanley to gloat over the gift - a tiny model of a vertibird, just like the ones Leonard Carrington repaired at work - and crept quietly to the kitchen to watch his mother prepare tea for the guests. Her honey brown hair was long and light, and hung past her waist in a single braid that twitched back and forth with her quick movements. He admired his father deeply, but adored his mother unconditionally. It was just the two of them most of the time. It was she who had taught him to read, and who sought out books for them to read together, borrowing the precious volumes from their friends and neighbors. With her stories, she made their tiny house and treeless yard on the old army base seem magical, a little world created just for them.

Still, Arcade wished that his father were here tonight, so that his mother would stop worrying. The house seemed empty without him, even when they had guests. A tall man who wore his blonde hair slightly too long for regulations, Israel Gannon dwarfed his wife, towering a full head-and-a-half over her small stature. On the rare occasions when they went on long walks together as a family, he would carry Arcade on his shoulders when his short legs grew tired. It was an incredible height to see the world from, and those were the moments when he loved his father the best. A thoughtful, educated man, he spoke only sparingly and was difficult to anger, but when he  _did_  speak, everyone listened respectfully. Arcade wanted to be exactly like him when he grew up, even if that meant being a soldier as well. People said he looked like him already. His hair was just as blond.

Miriam caught him daydreaming, jaw cracking in the middle of a massive yawn. "Arcade, can you carry the sugar to the table, please?" She handed him the sweetener - a small bottle of agave syrup - and a spoon, and gave him a little push. "Go on, then. Mr. Carrington will recite the  _nirtzah_ soon, and then you can go to bed."

He resumed his spot at the table, nibbling on the last fragment of matzah as his eyes grew heavier. His mother reentered the room, carrying a metal tray with the willow-patterned teapot and three tiny china cups, fragile heirlooms from before the War that children were  _never_  allowed to use. She stood waiting for Rachel to clear a space for the tray, when a knock at their door made her jump, making the utensils rattle in their places. She set everything down with characteristic grace, but from his place at her elbow, Arcade could see that her hands were trembling. He was nervous himself, and soothed his feelings by running ahead to open the door for her.

He blinked and stepped back, confused but not unhappy. It was Aunt Daisy, the pilot for his father's unit. She wasn't  _really_ his aunt - Israel Gannon had no brothers or sisters, and Miriam's entire extended family had been on the oil rig in 2242. But she loved him and he loved her, all jolly and full of life and jokes. She'd promised to take him up in a vertibird for his fifth birthday, just a few weeks away. But she had  _never_  come univited to his house at night before, let alone on a holiday like this. Arcade decided on the spot that he didn't mind the surprise, though.

"Aunt Daisy! Guess what? I found the  _matzah_ , but Stanley said…" Something about her face made him fall silent, and he froze in the act of running to hug her. She hadn't changed out of her flight suit yet and her helmet was tucked under one arm. She didn't look at him or crack a smile, but kept her gaze level, eyes intent on a point high above Arcade's head. Behind her, lingering in the dark beyond the doorstep, Arcade could see his father's other comrades - Judah, Orion, and Ebenezer ("Uncle Eb") - standing silently in full power armor, helmets held awkwardly at their sides. Struck by the strangeness of the scene, he was filled with a undefined sense of dread.

Daisy cleared her throat and began, "Miriam. I'm sorry-"

From a few few behind him, Arcade heard his mother let out a little gasp. Then she spoke, interrupting Daisy before she could get very far. "No. No.  _No_!"

The last "no" turned into a wordless howl of grief. Arcade went cold. He had never heard his mother scream like that - it was an animal's sound, full of pain and terror, and did not belong to her. Leaving the newcomers standing at the threshold, she ran to the back of the house. They all heard the slam of a door, and stood frozen for a moment. Arcade wanted to run, too, if not to his mother then to the hiding place under his bed. He realized at last that someone was missing from the assembled squad.

"Where's my daddy?" he asked Daisy, using a word that he would normally have deemed too childish to say in front of Stanley.

A muscle in her jaw worked, and she looked at him for the first time. As if his simple question was a catalyst for action, everyone began speaking and moving at once.

"I'll take Stanley home," Leonard offered gruffly. "I'm sorry, boy," he said to Arcade in passing. With that, he lead his own son out into the night. Before he followed his father, Stanley walked over to Arcade and handed him the coveted toy aircraft without a word, dark eyes big and solemn. Arcade accepted the gift automatically, puzzled by this sudden change of heart.

"I'll go to Miriam," Rachel said, exchanging a searching look with the pilot as she finally stood up from her place at the table. "If if there's anything I need to know first…"

"It's what you think." Daisy's voice was shaking and it looked as though she might start crying. "You can tell her it was quick. The other details can wait. We retrieved… him."

"Someone needs to tell the boy." This was Eb Johnson, now looking over Daisy's shoulder. His tone, usually loud and bluff and happy, was almost inaudible, and the corners of his mouth were turned down under his bristling black beard. "Look at him. He still doesn't understand. But he'll remember this night forever.  _I_  did, and I wasn't much older when  _my_..." He trailed off, looking around helplessly for support.

This was met with an unhappy sigh. "Arcade, can we go to your room, honey?" Daisy put her helmet down on the table, still strewn with the messy remains of dinner, and held out her hand for him to take. "I need to tell you something."

After sitting him down beside her on his bed, Daisy told him that his father was dead. He could never later remember the words that she had used, but he never forgot what they talked about afterwards.

She stayed with him until she thought he was asleep, letting him cry into the fabric of her uniform. She smelled like sweat and engine oil and cigarettes. He'd always found the combination comforting, but now he wished his mother would come to him instead. The walls of their house were thin. They could both hear Miriam Gannon's muffled sobs and her friend's words of consolation.

"I don't understand, Auntie.  _Why_  do they hate us so much? Why did they kill him?" Arcade didn't know much about the world beyond his neighborhood. He had gotten the impression that their enemies were diseased, ignorant barbarians, of no particular threat or significance. And yet they  _had_  destroyed the oil rig...

"Those are hard questions. I don't have easy answers for you. Basically, the world's not big enough for us  _and_  the NCR anymore. Now that they have the Brotherhood of Steel as their attack-dogs, things are a lot more dangerous for us. Israel died helping to keep you and your mother - and everyone else here - safe." She wiped her eyes with a dirty hand, leaving a dark smudge across her forehead. "Our enemies won't make it here," she added with forced confidence.

He wanted to believe her, but didn't know if he could anymore. "How do you know?"

She smiled at him, eyes hard and shiny. "Well, because me and the other guys are ready for them. Ain't nothing can beat a vertibird in flight, Arcade, and we have a ton of them. You know that."

"But…" He looked up at her, his lip trembling. "What if  _you_  die, too? An' Eb, and Judah, and Orion, and all the rest..."

"Shh. We  _won't_. It was bad luck tonight. We landed when we shouldn't have, where we thought it was safe. There was a trap. That won't happen again. We'll always take care of you and your ma. Count on it. Go to sleep now, okay? I'll come back in the morning and we'll go for a walk by the river."

* * *

While a small boy mourned his father, the surviving officers, politicians, and scientists of the Enclave left their homes in the dark of night for another hard meeting, circling the wagons a little tighter and arguing the future of their people. Many of them could see the writing on the wall now, for all that they had tried to ignore it for almost five years now. For some, it was finally time to pursue new options. To consider accepting the mysterious invitation that had come over the radio waves, summoning them to a new home.

Arcade was aware of none of this - he was a  _very_  little boy, after all, and no one had yet thought to give him an honest account of recent history. He only knew that bad people had torn his family apart and that he was scared of losing everybody else he cared about. He was scared that some faceless enemy, like an evil robot in a comic book, would come for him next. Anger would come later; for now, there was only grief and fear.


	2. Arroyo's End

**AN: Because of this chapter - and other chapters to come - I went ahead and added "violence" to the reasons this story is rated T. Even though I knew more or less what I wanted to say, this was hard to write. I didn't want the evil of the Enclave to be an abstract in this story, but neither did I want to sketch these characters as complete monsters. It was an interesting balance to find and it was made more complicated by the fact that all of this comes through a brand-new POV character who** _ **has**_   **to be human and relatable for this story to work. It was a challenge, and not a comfortable one for me.**

* * *

_May 12, 2242_

"You a daddy yet, Iz?" Daisy Whitman gave her navigator a grin as he folded his long body into the bucket seat to her right. As soon as he was in, she began the start-up sequence, clearly not wanting to linger another moment on the ground. None of the other vertibirds had left yet either, but their team had an extra stop to make and five more people to pick up.

Israel Gannon fastened his harness and braced himself for Daisy's triumphant leap into the airspace above Navarro's hangar. "If I was, I wouldn't be here. But it could be any day now, Dr. Eisenhower says."

She clucked her tongue sympathetically. "You couldn't get leave? We'll be gone for at least twelve hours, you know. You might miss the kid's entrance."

"Judah would have signed off on it if I had asked him," he admitted. "But I didn't want you to have to share a cockpit with someone who doesn't know what they're doing." He had a problem with passing off his duty to someone else. He wasn't the only one with a family, and if things  _did_  go badly today, he didn't want to leave his friends in the lurch.

"Poor Miriam," she said softly, and sounded like she meant it, despite the fact the the two women seldom had anything nice to say to or about one another. "Did her mother get clearance to visit from the Rig?"

"No. That will have to wait until she gets rotated off reactor maintenance in September, unfortunately. Rachel Carrington has said she'll help as much as she can in the meantime."

"You should be there right now," Daisy reiterated, locking eyes with her friend for a moment. "If I were her, I'd be jealous."

"Miriam knows there's nothing between you and me," he replied calmly. "She also knows I swore an oath to my duty."  _Knows it, but doesn't like it_ , he reminded himself wearily.

Daisy persisted. "You'll need a better line than that if you miss that baby coming."

"Thank you, sergeant, that's enough," he said, letting some of his own self-doubt show with an lapse into formality. "Let's do this job. Where are we picking up the others?"

"Border station B,  _sir_ ," she said crisply, eyes on the screen. "Captain's had them out here for two days, training a couple of privates for the field. One of 'em might fill Anselmo's spot on comms, if that leg of his doesn't heal up. Johnson might see himself replaced too if he doesn't start following orders," she added darkly, shaking her head.

"Johnson's a good man, and there's no one I'd rather have on the ground with me against super mutants. Be a shame if Kreger farms him out to guard duty." The sniper was another reason for his decision not to miss this mission. The man was one bad report away from a court martial, and Israel wasn't willing to let that happen if he could help it.

"In case you haven't read your briefing, you're not fighting super mutants today,  _lieutenant_. Why don't you pull rank on our eternal corporal and remind him of his duty? Else we might see a repeat of what happened at that fucking vault." She sighed. "He's our friend, and a superb shot  _when he wants to be_ , but he's a piss-poor soldier."

"Eb wasn't the only one who wasn't happy with that business. No one asked me, but I would rather have transported the deathclaws than clear that vault. It was… rough work."

She snorted. "Speak for yourself. I'm not taking any of those lizards up with me, even if they are the smart ones."

As Daisy began to bring the craft down for a landing near the station at the edge of their territory, Israel pulled out his comms pad and skimmed quickly through the mission parameters. "Arroyo? We don't have that logged on our maps." He entered the coordinates and studied the lay of the land. "Southern Oregon. Due west of Klamath. A lot of canyons in that area. Watch for unpredictable wind currents when we're low. Remember the last time we were here?"

She groaned. "How could I forget? High command sure won't. Two of the survey team dead, and they never did recover that Mr. Handy. Must be why they haven't issued us a new bot."

"It wasn't your fault. I said so in my report." He thought back, trying to remember the official verdict on the inquiry. "They said it was 'Mechanical-'"

"Yeah, yeah. 'Unanticipated mechanical failure with terrain inadequate for a safe landing.' I know, I know. It still hurts to have a crash on my record. One of those stuffed shirts in HQ had the gall to recommend that I take some time off. As if one glitch should keep me grounded." Daisy loved to fly. The destination wasn't all that important to her, so long as she could do some sight-seeing on the way home.

Israel hummed in sympathy, before bowing his head to read the specifications for the mission. The briefing had popped up on his terminal at 0600 hours, time enough for him to have read it in full, but most of the two hours since had been spent arguing with his hormonal wife, assuring her that  _yes_ , he'd be back, and  _soon_. He'd read enough in the first few lines to know that this was as low-risk as it got: neither the Brotherhood nor the NCR had the reach to interfere with their operations this far north, at the back end of nowhere. The targets themselves were beneath notice as adversaries, mere devolved savages living in huts. It was hard for him to believe that these, too, were the lineal descendants of men who had traveled to the moon, but that was the sad truth of it. They were living proof that the Enclave's mission wasn't in vain, even if the particulars were hard for someone in the the need-to-know intelligence category to appreciate at times. In this case, it seemed that the powers-that-be required another set of test subjects to continue their experiments of the past year. Only these needed to have a moderately-high mutagenic count.

Israel hadn't been lying before - the strike on Vault 13 had been unpalatable work for his tastes. Those  _had_  been humans with a clean genome, after all. They represented the sort of population that the Enclave had occasionally recruited from in the past to bolster their numbers. Still, orders were orders, and that one had come from the top. The eggheads on the Oil Rig had needed a control group for a vital, top-secret study, and so they had gotten one. It was a pity about the people, though. Except for their ignorance, they were almost like them. So much like them, in fact, that they could pass for native-born Enclave, at least on a cellular level. Some did, as it turned out.

It wasn't public knowledge, but Israel knew that most of the healthy vault children under five had been placed discreetly with childless couples, both on the Oil Rig and at Navarro. Young Stanley Carrington was one of these and now, less than a year later, the boy had almost completely forgotten where he came from. He was one of them now, as bright and happy as any other child on base, no longer confined to a life spent underground.

At Vault 13, providing fire support while an intelligence operative from the president's inner circle had used long-kept codes to force the door open, Israel hadn't given himself permission to think overmuch about what they were doing. The US government had commissioned these vaults, thus the Enclave had inherited the right to  _decommission_ them whenever they saw fit, ending social experiments that had endured for over a century and a half. Still, authorized or not, they  _were_  kidnapping people who had no idea who their attackers were or why their home was being invaded. Orders were orders, however, and once the vault's guards had started firing, it had become much easier to fire back.

Nevertheless, after Israel had discovered that he and Miriam were going to be parents themselves, he found himself thinking, more and more, about what the vault families had gone through that day, and in all the months since. They would die without knowing that their sons and daughters would be cherished and protected, raised to be citizens of the only remaining nation on earth. They would only know that they were gone.

Unfortunately, no such invitation could be extended to the offspring of Arroyo - if any still lived at all. The assault on the village was to be an act of mercy and Israel was glad that the higher-ups had chosen their target the way they had. His briefing contained pictures taken from the air by vertibirds and by cloaked eyebots concealed around the village: all of the reports showed that the crops, the animals, the children, and the elderly were dead or dying from a combination of drought and plague. They would be ending suffering rather than causing it today. This realization came as a relief to him. He wasn't a cruel man. Not like some.

"There they are," Daisy announced, switching to heli-mode and dropping neatly onto to the hard-baked stretch of marked sand they used for landings. She waited a minute to allow the dust to settle, then reached for the lever that would release the side door. "You had as well suit up now. You know the captain's a stickler for that in the field."

" _Kreger_  doesn't have to fit himself into this chair in full armor," he countered, though he was already unbuckling to do as she suggested. Discipline and the chain of command became infinitely more important when Johnson and Moreno were sharing close space together. That was doubly true for a mission like this one, where Johnson was liable to chafe under orders. Israel gritted his teeth in anticipation of the "pep talk" that he'd have to give his subordinate at some point soon. A lifelong friend, Eb had been the best man at his wedding; Israel didn't want to see him suffer the consequences of disobedience.

With the rest of the unit aboard - the three regulars, plus the two privates - there was no more casual banter or jokes, only quiet, professional conversation to pass the hours of travel. When it was just the two of them up front, they were friends; when all five were there, they were soldiers. At the fifteen-minute warning, they checked and double-checked weapons and helmet seals and attended closely to Judah Kreger's instructions.

"Testing. Can you all hear me? Good. Keep your mics on, folks. I don't want  _anyone_  taking any chances today. It's the easy missions that go wrong, when we get  _complacent_." Captain Kreger was speaking at a normal tone from his position at the back, but Israel could hear him as clear as day through the tiny speaker in his helmet. "Arroyo has two natural defenses - the ravine to the south and the cliffs to the north. A is landing in their fields to the northwest, B is putting down in a flat space to the northeast, C is dropping shock troops and a fuckton of stun-gas on their town center, and D - that's us - is taking up a position at the south. We're to blow the bridge, then advance toward town to mop up whatever the gas and C's heavies don't get. There will be no survivors other than the ones we take. No witnesses. HQ wants a minimum of fifty subjects, and a maximum of sixty, but beyond that everything is a loose end we don't want. When we leave here today, Arroyo will no longer exist. Understood?"

They understood.

Kreger went on to explain that in addition to the four fully-crewed 'birds from Navarro, HQ had also sent four of their own, but these were staffed mainly with medical personnel and equipped with the means to transport the prisoners back to the Oil Rig. They would stay clear until the fighting was over, hovering over the perimeter and waiting for the suits to finish the dirty work. When A-group's leader, Captain Lightfoot, gave the all-clear, then the two lowest-ranking non-pilots in each unit would assist with gathering prisoners while the others guarded the perimeter and searched for escapees.

Then, finally, as the crack in the ground far below became a gaping canyon, it was time. Kreger passed on to them what he was being fed through his radio. "That's C's signal; they're dropping the gas. Put us down, Whitman. Suit up, but stay with the vertibird and be ready to take off if it gets mobbed somehow. Everybody: do your duty for your country. That's all your president asks from you."

 _My duty_ , Israel thought with satisfaction.  _That's exactly what I'm doing_. Miriam had rejected his choice, and Daisy had scoffed at his priorities, but the knowledge that he was doing what he did for the Enclave, for his  _family_ , warmed him to his work. Jumping down from the door even before the rotors had stopped spinning, he fired the first shot and a streak of plasma cut through the chest of a guard who had lifted his spear to throw at the vertibird. There. That was one less unfortunate brute to pollute the country he loved. Without mutated rabble like this taking up space and resources, America  _would_  be great again. Someday. In his son's lifetime, he hoped.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Moreno cutting down two more guards, a man and a woman, with machine gun fire, the bullets ripping holes in the hut behind them. One of the new recruits - Sanders or Turpin, he wasn't sure - tossed an incendiary grenade into the doorway and in a moment it was ablaze. The other gave the rope bridge spanning the chasm the same treatment, cutting off the only easy escape route by land. They advanced on the village slowly but steadily, shoulder to shoulder, spread out enough to cover the space, but not so much that anyone could slip between the ranks.

Fifty yards from the cliff at their backs, the captain put up a hand to halt the line there. No one had emerged yet from the clouds of gas and they waited impatiently. They could hear screaming and gunfire, but only at a distance, distorted by the ringing echoes against the cliffs.

"Now,  _don't_  tell me the others are going to have all the fun." That was Moreno in his ear, on the public channel, too-loud and too-enthusiastic, as per his usual. "It's just like HQ to call in four units where one or two could have done just fine."

Israel chanced a look at Johnson, one space to his left, and his heart sank. The man hadn't fired his gun in the initial exchange - hadn't even drawn it from the holster on his back. Israel checked the field ahead again. Still nothing. Toggling his private channel and quickly setting it to his friend's code, he whispered to him.

"Johnson.  _Johnson._ Eb! Get in gear. At least  _pretend_  like you're following orders." He got only silence and unsteady breathing in reply. He switched back to the public channel with an angry gesture and caught the tail end of Kreger's latest communique.

"...I repeat, there's a large group fleeing through the woods from our nine o'clock. Shoot to kill. Lightfoot says they have more than enough subjects subdued already. We caught them in the middle of some kind of group activity."

Israel broke into a jog, slapping Johnson sharply on the right pauldron as he passed. He had done as much as he could for the man, and he only hoped that no one else noticed that he wasn't responding. As soon as he reached the shade, the real work began, and he had no more time to worry about what Johnson was or wasn't doing behind him. He did have the time to be thankful, in between clips, that the helmet filtered out all of the smell and a lot of the ambient noise. Inside his armor, the air was clean and climate-controlled. It was like carrying a piece of civilization along with him, a bubble of rarefied atmosphere that kept him comfortably separate from it all.

He killed men, skinny scarecrows wearing little more than a loincloth. Women as well, screeching harpies who wore only slightly more than the men. He saw no children, though with the smoke from the burning huts fogging up his vision, it was hard to tell who he was shooting at. If it moved and it wasn't wearing armor he shot at it. Visibility was only getting worse the farther in he went. The trees were alight in places now, their dry leaves caught by the laser weapons of some of the others, and the smoke made the broad daylight of morning seem like evening

Dimly, over the noise that did get through his filter, he heard Kreger's voice telling them to wheel right, to leave the trees (and the forest fire they'd kindled) behind. Temporarily out of visual range of the others, he obeyed blindly, and was rewarded by the sight of light shining between the thinning trunks ahead.

He almost tripped over the woman. She'd taken refuge under a fallen log, and he didn't see her until he was almost on top of her. Unlike all of the others they'd met, she was unarmed, carrying only a dirty, unmoving bundle from which a limp, sticklike arm dangled. The baby was already dead, he decided, and the woman was dying - her tunic was blackened and smoking all down one side where someone had shot her and her eyes were glazed with shock. She stared up at him without attempting to speak, fear, confusion, and pain plainly visible on her features.  _What must I look like to her_ , he thought in a rare moment of self-examination.  _A monster straight out of some tribal legend._

 _This is mercy_ , he reminded himself when his hand wouldn't respond at first.  _Like culling a wounded animal_. He was lifting his gun to put her out of her misery, when  _something_  very large and heavy crashed into him from the side, sending him sprawling and dropping his plasma defender in the process. The grate of metal on metal and the whir of the other's servos told him everything he needed to know. Even before he had recovered his balance from the hit, he was venting his rage.

"Are you  _crazy_?" he yelled, incensed. "Are you blind?"

"Are  _you_? Don't you know what you're  _doing_?" Israel froze on the spot. Johnson had finally drawn his weapon, but it was pointed straight at  _him_. "You're killing  _people_. A mother. A child. A  _family_. Can't you  _see_?"

"I'm doing my job," he said, as evenly as possible, not moving a muscle. If the man had really lost his mind, then he might very well use that plasma caster on him. "It's not pleasant, but someone has to-" Distracted by Johnson, he didn't hear the footsteps crashing toward them, or see their newest attacker before he'd already thrown his spear. The aim was good, but the power and the materials were entirely insufficient to harm their target. It hurt far less than Johnson's tackle, glancing off the angled plates on his chest before disappearing into the bracken at their feet.

Taking advantage of the confusion, Israel moved then - in the direction of the  _real_  hazard, the soldier who'd cracked in the field - and tore the rifle from his comrade's hands, shooting the woman, her dirty armful of probably-dead child, and the savage who still stood by, gaping at his failure to bring down the monster. In a moment, there were three bodies lying on the forest floor.

"There," he said, breathing heavily. "If the disciplinary committee checks your gun this time, at least it's been fired. It's a  _pity_ ," he said, giving the barrel a vicious torque with his powered fist, deforming it beyond use, "that your weapon was damaged in the fight. Take this and go back to the 'bird and wait there. That's an  _order_." He stooped to pick up his own pistol, not taking his eyes off of the other. "Don't make me hurt you, old friend.  _Please_."

Johnson turned and left without another word, and Israel continued on, no longer cool and distant, but angry and bothered. Maybe that was why he allowed Moreno to get under his skin. The man had switched to a flamethrower and was roasting what remained of some decorative structures on the west side of town, whooping and hollering as the timbers split and collapsed and the brightly colored banners went up in flames. Israel jammed in another code, and snapped at him, "A little decorum, if you please, soldier. Leave that sadistic bullshit to Horrigan and the free-range muties."

A long pause followed. Then, a grudging, "Yes, sir." Israel technically outranked Moreno, but the second lieutenant deeply resented being reminded of it. Ordinarily, he might have given him free rein - who would care, really? - but it seemed inappropriate to dance on the grave that they had made, however necessary it had been.

Israel sighed, looking around. The only bodies he were those of the villagers, now being tossed into the larger bonfires. He saw twenty men and women, armored as he was, either standing idle or carrying out tasks. It seemed as if the fight had gone more or less the way most of the Enclave's engagements did. There was no contest to be had with cavemen. Another voice jumped into into his ear - the captain's, now on a private channel - with a new task for him: "Gannon, go verify that their witch-doctor is dead. The first wave got him - bad - but he scuttled off into his little patch of a garden before they could finish him out."

"Right away, captain."

Glad to have something to do, he found the garden easily enough, a thick stand of vines, bordered by herbs he couldn't name. He trampled these as he worked his way into the thicket. The garden had appeared small from the outside, but now it seemed a jungle that towered over his head, oppressive and spooky. He shook his head in confusion at his own internal choice of words -  _Spooky? Really?_ \- and forced his way to the center, where the foliage was less thick. A carnivorous plant struck him then, blunting green teeth on his arm, and he tore it up by the roots without even thinking about it.  _He had spore plants in his garden? What the hell for?_

Israel found the old man, more dead than alive, lying in a small clearing beneath four more of these specimens. At first, he thought that the shaman was wearing a mask, but on closer examination he saw that the markings - the lines and teeth of a grinning skull - were the result of some kind of grotesque body art. He was crooning something to the mutant fly-traps, a tuneless, wordless melody that kept the plants swaying in protection over him without attacking. Israel watched this performance for a long, curious moment, before destroying these as well, putting a blast of plasma into each of their yawning mouths. He reloaded, standing over the pitiful body with its charred, weeping skin, but before he could shoot he heard a cracked, reedy voice rising up from the dying man.

"You will listen to me now, metal man. You are in my garden now, subject to… certain rules and influences. You are going to leave me here to die at a time of my choosing, not your evil will. The will you gloss over with the salve of  _orders_."

"That's not how this part works," he told him, though he did find himself inclined to wait. Why not? It'd be hours before his team could leave, and he had little else to do. The man's strangely pale eyes locked onto his own, hidden though they were behind a mirror-like visor.

The voice grew stronger and louder, though the cracked lips appeared not to move at all. "My children have flourished here since the time of the Vault Dweller. Your hellish fires have put an end to a way of life that has endured for three generations. It consoles me to know that you have spelled your own doom today. Our people, a ransom for the world. This was our purpose from the beginning, though we did not know it."

"My doom?" Israel wondered if the seals on his helmet had been loosened by the scuffle in the woods. Something - the smoke in the air, or the intoxicating pollen of the plants, perhaps - was making him slow and stupid.

"Yes, you. And all of you. You have destroyed our homes, and thus you will lose both of yours. The cradle on the basin of tears, and the little refuge on its lip. You have killed; you will be killed. You have stolen children; you will lose your own. Your son will turn from your legacy before he is a man."

Israel fumbled for an answer, the beginnings of a sharp headache boring like a skewer into the back of his head, sweat running into his eyes from the strain of trying to speak against that  _voice_. His answer was clumsy, a childish jibe more befitting a schoolboy. "Take it back, or I'll-"

"It matters not. This is a truth, whether I say it or not: your days are numbered, metal man. You may leave now. Your work here is done.  _Go._ "

With no sense of the passage of time, Israel found himself stepping back out of the pocket jungle and into the sun. He looked down with some confusion at the pistol in his hand. The barrel was warm, so he  _must_  have fired it. Yes, he remembered now. He had shot the old man between those pale eyes. That was the last thing he remembered consciously. After that, he had… nodded off, or something. Making a mental note to get his helmet filters serviced - and  _soon_  - he cleared his throat and trotted purposefully back to the village center. Best not to mention anything about his lost time. He felt fine now and the last thing he wanted was a long quarantine in Medical. Not when he was about to meet his son.

"That took a hell of a long time, lieutenant." Israel could almost see Kreger's frown behind his mask, and hastened to explain, though he wasn't sure if his answer made sense.

"Sorry, sir. There were spore plants in there. I thought it best to destroy them as well, as per protocol on that species."

"Uh-huh." He didn't sound convinced. "What of the corporal? He was near you in the woods, wasn't he?"

"Weapon failure. I sent him back to await further instructions." Israel hesitated. "Should I call him back?" He didn't think Johnson should see this scene in his current state of agitation. Behind the captain, there were a dozen scientists in bright yellow hazmat suits, injecting new drugs into the semiconscious prisoners and strapping them to boards. Every now and then, they would decide that an individual was too weak or too injured to bother with, and would summon a soldier to execute them.

"Christ, no. We don't want a repeat of what happened at that vault. I should have invented a reason to leave him at base." He waved a hand. "Take Moreno and help A- and B-group burn the fields to smoke out any survivors."

An hour later, their team was given leave to depart. Israel suspected that the captain had pulled some strings to get them out of there the soonest, for his and Miriam's sake. He would never have asked for special treatment, but he appreciated the gesture.

"Pretty impressive scratch there, Gannon," Daisy said loudly, trying to cover up the sound of Johnson's muffled weeping from the seat behind her, audible even over the roar of the craft's engines. "For a spear-wielding savage living in the stone age, that is. That he even got  _close_  to you is amazing. You're not getting slow, are you?"

Israel studied the white mark that the sharpened flint had left on the black enamel. "It'll buff out," he said absently, watching the pillar of smoke recede into the distance as they left what remained of Arroyo behind and attained altitude. "I'm dropping the whole ensemble off for maintenance when we get back. Had as well, since I'll be on leave for the next few weeks."

"What are you going to name him?"

"What?" It wasn't just Johnson distracting him. The old man's dying words still echoed in his ears.  _Your days are numbered, metal man._

"Your kid's name, Iz. C'mon. You can tell me." Daisy had the habit of dropping straight back into earlier conversations without any warning at all, and it always took him a moment to catch up. It was easy for  _her_ , he thought;  _she_  hadn't had to march through hell in the intervening hours.

He hesitated. They hadn't shared their baby's name with anyone yet. Miriam had been absolutely convinced from day one that their child would be a girl and had insisted upon choosing the name. She had graciously allowed her husband to choose the boy name, a concession that she had regretted somewhat after the twenty-week scan revealed the gender. "Arcade Israel. It's still a secret, so don't go telling everyone."

"My lips are sealed. Do you want my  _honest_ opinion about that name?"

"Probably not."

"Then it's great. I'll call him 'Archie.'"

"You  _wouldn't_ ," he cried with mock horror.

"Wouldn't I?" She grinned at him, then punched the throttle to full speed. "Alright, we can skip the scenic route today. Let's get you home,  _dad_."


	3. A Little Risk for a Little Freedom

_September 7, 2242, Navarro Army Base_

The last box. She almost hated to pick it up. They'd been in their new house for over a year, and Miriam was  _still_  unpacking. That was twelve months they'd been without some vital necessity of civilized life… whatever was in there. Even though she'd labelled it herself, she'd forgotten what "miscellaneous (decorative)" referred to. She opened the box and frowned. Extra placemats, a set of tarnished old napkin rings - a wedding gift from her second cousin - and a small, ugly statue that she had previously kept in the corner of their bathroom back on the Oil Rig. She supposed that those things didn't matter. But now that the box was empty, she couldn't pretend any longer that they weren't here to stay. That going back - going  _home_  - was as easy as loading up their belongings into a vertibird. This was their home for the long haul. Until Israel came to his senses.

Somehow, she never saw the bombshell coming, though that may have been willful blindness on her part. In retrospect, he  _had_  dropped some hints during their courtship, which had begun only well into adulthood. Two grades apart in school and belonging to entirely different friend circles, they took different career paths after graduation - her to nursing and him to the military. It wasn't until years later that she met him properly, late one night while filling a overnight shift at the clinic. It wasn't her usual job - she was doing a favor for a friend - but it was almost guaranteed to be quiet. A good time to catch up on some reading, she thought. And it  _was_ , right up until a man walked in, bleeding copiously from his head. In her surprise, it took a moment to catch up, but soon she had pulled the name from her memory: Israel Gannon. A lanky teenager no longer.

"What happened?" she asked him, standing on a step so she could reach to stitch up the cut on his eyebrow. "Did you get into a fight?" She was  _supposed_ to report any injuries caused by violence, but she had a feeling that this handsome stranger's paperwork would get lost in the shuffle.

He grinned. "You could say that. A fight with the frame on my shower door. I'm too tall for almost everything on this boat."

 _You sure are_ , she agreed silently. It was the first thing she'd noticed about him. If he'd wanted to, he could have picked her up and set her on top of the supplies cabinet. "Did you win?" she joked.

"I'd call it a draw. On that note, I need to call maintenance in the morning."

She laughed and he joined in. "You're a good sport about this," she told him.

"Well, it's given me an excuse to spend the evening with a beautiful woman." She blushed.

By the time he left, hours later (she'd kept him there, on the feeble pretense that he needed observation after hitting his head), she had learned that he'd recently been reassigned to the Oil Rig after spending years at a desolate post on the mainland, that he'd played basketball in school, and that he enjoyed reading history. Oh,  _and_  he could quote Latin poetry. She was hooked. Within a week, after he'd invented a variety of factitious reasons to visit her at work, she was in love.

That he was a soldier didn't bother her. Not at first. Miriam didn't like guns - had never fired one, in fact, not even at the practice range - and actively avoided the areas of the boat under guard by troops in power-armor. Their masks scared her, reminding her of nightmares she'd had as a child after she'd been caught out-of-bounds by an irritated patrol near the reactor. She didn't really know any other soldiers: all of her family, going back as many generations as they could remember, were scientists, engineers, doctors, and teachers. But their relationship worked because Israel was good about keeping the different parts of his life from touching. Whoever he was on the job, he was another person entirely at home. This suited her fine. She loved the man who left his armor and weapons at the door and he loved her. She knew that beyond a doubt.

The trouble started two years into their marriage. He was thirty, she was twenty-eight, and in her opinion they had everything they needed to be happy for the rest of their lives. Her family lived just a few corridors away - she saw her mother, sisters, nieces, and nephews every day - and the routine familiarity was exactly what she wanted. She enjoyed her work as a pediatric nurse, assisting with inoculations and check-ups for the three-hundred-odd children on board. So much so, in fact, that it was easy for her to give an enthusiastic "yes!" to Israel's suggestion that they start a family of their own. But it was this venture - as enjoyable as it was - that led indirectly to their first big fight, only a few months later. He'd been offered a transfer to a long-range patrol based out of their permanent base at Navarro. The caveat: either he'd have to move his family to base housing, or they'd be stuck seeing each other only once every three months. By the time he told her, he had already made up his mind, waxing eloquent in that enthusiastic way he had when he had his heart set on something, hand gesticulating to take in the enormity of the idea.

"I don't want our children growing up the same way we did. Dark walls, filtered air, and cramped spaces? No, Miriam. The world is ours to inherit. Let's  _inherit_ it." He'd smiled then, as if he understood her fear and could account for every objection she might present. "Navarro is  _safe_ , Miriam. Why else would they open it to our families?"

"If it's so safe, then why aren't the president's grandchildren living there?" she demanded. To that, he had no answer but that freedom was worth a little risk. That life in a fortress was no life at all. Not for  _their_  children.

The Oil Rig meant something different to him than it did to her. To her it was safety. Home. Family. To Israel, it was a prison. He had no family - other than his wife - to tie him there. Out  _there_ , he was fighting for a new world and he wasn't willing to settle for a tiny corner of it.

All of her arguments and pleading had been for nothing. Even storming out to spend the week with her mother and younger sister had done no good. It was then she'd discovered her pregnancy - and that she desperately missed her husband - and in the end she had relented rather than lose him or make him unhappy. They would move, many months ahead of their child's birth, and their baby would be born on the Outside.

* * *

Arcade was four months old now and the struggle had gotten no easier for Miriam. Learning more about the realities of life out here had actually made her fears  _worse_. She was self-aware and educated enough to know that postpartum anxiety was playing havoc with her mood, exacerbating her emotional response, but the objective reality was bad enough to be going on. For one thing, she knew that children - and adults - needed twice as many vaccinations and injections to stay healthy out here, to protect them from various factors in the environment. There were days on end, when the wind was blowing the wrong way, that civilians and everyone else out of armor had to huddle in makeshift quarters in the immense, below-ground military complex. Because of radiation. And virus-counts. Once a week, there were drills to practice such a retreat to safety, just in case of… she didn't know exactly. Surely nothing would attack  _them_? Everywhere around her, it seemed, even in the air they were breathing, there was something that could hurt her son. It was enough to make her crazy.

Without her family, and with her only friend back at work now that her son was in school, she was alone eight days out of ten with a colicky baby, in a house she couldn't keep clean to save her life - a fine, dry dust  _always_ seeped in through the cracks somehow, no matter how much she swept. And even when Israel  _was_  home, he was different now. Had changed somehow, just before Arcade was born. There was less laughter, less gentleness, less optimism. He wasn't the father she had expected him to be, nor the husband he had been before.

"What happened to you out there?" she would ask, the question usually coming out harsher than she meant after another sleepless night. "I'm your  _wife_. You're acting strange. Tell me what's wrong."

"Nothing's  _wrong_ , Miriam. You can't understand if you weren't there. You don't need to know." And he wouldn't say any more. If she pressed him, he retreated to his books, took Arcade for a walk without her, or joined his friends at the bar, leaving her angry, fearful, and alone.

A little harmony was better than none, she decided, and she learned in time not to push him, to take what she could get in the good moments. She loved her husband, and blamed all his time spent on the Outside for the change she saw in him. She prayed that one day, he too would understand that, and would agree to take them home. Then everything would be the way it was before.

In the meantime, one bright spot kept Miriam going through the early months of motherhood: her own mother was coming to stay - for two whole weeks - in the middle of September. With some decent sleep, surely her problems would seem smaller. She and Israel could spend time together, just the two of them, and could talk without their son's demanding cries getting in the way for once. Maybe then he'd let her help, let her  _fix_  him just like she'd once fixed that cut on his head.

* * *

A knock at the front door surprised her in the middle of folding the last box for easy storage, and woke Arcade from where he'd been sleeping restlessly in his swing. He immediately began to wail. She scooped him up, muttering about unwelcome visitors, and flung the door open to find Daisy Whitman on the stoop. She was so surprised that she forgot to be hostile.

"Israel's not here," she said stupidly, trying to remember if she'd forgotten something, some message or summons. The pilot had  _never_  shown up at their house before, and for good reason. She could count on one hand the number of conversations she'd had with the woman, mainly at mandatory assemblies, and the atmosphere between the two of them had never been warm. Miriam hadn't wasted much time worrying that her husband was cheating on her - she was pretty sure Whitman wasn't wired to be her rival in that respect - but she was jealous of her all the same. As a soldier, she was privy to a side of Israel's life that Miriam couldn't get close to.  _She_  probably knew what his nightmares were about.  _She_  knew where he went when his eyes got cold and distant. When that happened, he might as well have been on the moon for all the difference it made; Miriam couldn't reach him.

Whitman was in civilian clothes today, and stood outside with her hands jammed into her pockets. "Yeah, I know. With my 'bird in the hangar for maintenance, he and the crew are out with someone else today. I came to see you. And Arcade too, of course. Been meaning to stop for a while, actually. May I?" She reached for the fussy baby, and Miriam handed him over reflexively. Tucked into the crook of the other woman's arm, he immediately calmed. "Can I come in?" she asked politely

Miriam stood aside, shifting automatically into hostess mode despite her resentful feelings. "Would you like something to drink?" There was tea - but no sugar - and water. She didn't feel like offering up the precious wine she saved for holidays.

Her guest settled herself comfortably in one of the two mismatched chairs. "You got whiskey?  _Kidding_. I'm good. I just wanted to talk a minute."

"Oh." She took the place across the table. "About what?" It occurred to her then that she knew almost nothing about the person sitting in her kitchen, other than the obvious: she was coarse and cheerful, drank too much, and got along altogether too well with her husband.

She shot her a slightly scornful look, as if to say  _What do you think?_ "About the only thing we have in common. I don't know how much Israel tells you about what we do when we're out on assignment..." she began, her voice unusually hesitant for the strident woman.

"Nothing. He tells me nothing." Was the bitterness obvious? Yes, yes it was. She took a deep breath. "Only the most general accounts. No details at all. He says they're not worth repeating."

"That's about right. It's not  _all_  honor and glory. A lot of what we do is nasty and unpleasant, unless you're completely heartless. It's hard even for  _me_  to understand, since I usually get to keep some distance between me and the action. I know it's for sure gotta be hard for you, 'specially if he's as close-mouthed at home as he is in the cockpit. Anyway, I'm here because I'm worried about him."

Miriam's heart quickened. "I know Johnson had a breakdown." Previously a frequent guest at their table, Eb had been demoted and faced months of reeducation and undesirable assignment at a distant facility on the northern coast. Israel's face had been dark when he told her this, but he hadn't said what Eb's crime - or his mistake - had been. "Do you think that could happen to my husband?" she asked fearfully.

Whitman almost smiled. "No, don't worry about that. Your man's made of stronger stuff than that.  _He_  won't forget his duty, no matter what. But it's still hard for him to do what has to be done. He does it, but it eats at him, and he doesn't talk about it with anybody. I'm trying to help you understand what's going on in his head. So the outside problems don't end up causing your family problems here."

Miriam almost thanked the woman for putting these frustrations into words, but then an unpleasant thought occurred to her. "What makes you think we're having problems?"

The pilot gave an awkward shrug, switching the sleeping baby to the other arm. "We talk, even if we don't really talk about what's bothering him. I'm not blind. I know when he's tired or uncomfortable or sad, whether he tells me or not." She added hastily, "He doesn't complain about you. Nothing like that. He's just distracted lately."

Miriam quashed the anger that threatened to rear its head. How  _dare_  she try to interfere, or pretend to know Israel better than  _she_  did. "If he's tired," she said tightly, "it's because Arcade hasn't slept for more than three hours at a time since he was born." Not that her husband got up much in the night - there wasn't much  _he_  could do to soothe a breastfed baby - but the crying was impossible to ignore and he slept lightly.

Whitman nodded, eager to be agreeable. "Sure, sure… a new baby doesn't help. That combined with other factors could be real stressful. Anyway, I've said my piece. I hope it helps."

"Uh-huh… thanks."  _I guess_.

Whitman sighed. "I fucked up on the delivery, I know. Sorry. All I wanted to say is that he loves you, and that he's trying to protect you, no matter what. Me 'n the guys, we're his  _friends_. We're good for a drink and a crude laugh. But when we get out of a hairy situation and we turn home, it's always you and Arcade he's thinking about. Your picture he's looking at. If he doesn't bring the bad stuff home - or tries not to - there's a reason for that. Don't hold it against him. Give him time. Give him an opening, when he's ready."

"Don't curse around the baby," she said automatically, before adding, "I appreciate the message. Really. I'll try harder to understand. None of my family were soldiers, you know. I'm the first one to live out here for generations and I'm still not used it. I really have no idea of what kind of world exists outside our compounds. Only what we learn in school. I tell myself I don't like being left in the dark, but part of me doesn't really  _want_  to know." She looked away, suddenly ashamed.  _And he knows that. Knows it would just upset me_.  _What kind of wife am I to back him into a corner like that?_  She resolved to do better in the future. To be receptive to new knowledge, even if it bothered her.

She snorted. "Yeah. School didn't even  _begin_  to scratch the surface of what kind of world we're dealing with. What sort of monsters live out there, human and otherwise. Still, I couldn't wait to leave the Enclave bubble. At 16, I took the first assignment that got me to the mainland. I haven't looked back since." She stood up. "I'll get out of your hair now. Want me to set the little guy down in his crib? He's out cold."

Grateful at least for a sleeping baby, Miriam smiled genuinely for the first time all day. "Thank you. It's back this way." Before she had gotten halfway down the hallway, however, a siren rang out from several different points on the base, the rising and falling warbles clashing oddly as the sound reached the houses on the edge. Miriam turned, confused, to look at her guest. "Another drill? We had one yesterday."

"No. It ain't." She thrust the infant into Miriam's arms, taking a professional tone now, and briefly checked the gun on her hip before turning to leave. "We need to get underground.  _Leave_ that," she snapped, when she saw Miriam trying to gather up Arcade's blanket and toys. "Follow me and move fast. I don't know what's up, but there's only a handful of things that signal means, and none of them are good."


	4. Memento Mori

" _My dear friends - members of the Enclave, fellow Americans - I console you in your time of grief. I beg you, look no further for your next move. I, President John Henry Eden, have maintained control these many years of a military installation near our glorious nation's old capital. Come. Join me here. Bring your families. Your weapons. Your aircraft. There's room for all! I will be waiting."_

-Eden Transmission #1, AAF-Navarro (transcribed 9/7/42)

* * *

No one had ever  _told_  Arcade why he'd taken his first steps in a world saturated by grief. Not that he could remember, anyway. He just  _knew_. The Oil Rig - or its absence - was a reality that shaped every aspect of his limited existence.

He had a mother who was perpetually sad and anxious. The mourner's Kaddish was his first lullaby, and the first recitation he learned to say back to her. It was normal for him to see smiles mixed with tears. He let her hold him too tight, keep him close even when he wanted to play, because he knew she needed the reassurance. From his earliest days, he learned to be the person that other people needed, sublimating his own wants for theirs.

He never knew any father other than the soldier who came home still carrying the tools of his trade, whose armor sat - eternally on the ready - in the corner of the tiny study where he retreated after dinner. Arcade loved him, knew that the world depended on his father's protection, but there was a cautious edge to that respect. Before bed on nights when his father was home, he'd creep into the  _sanctum sanctorum_  - as his mother called it for some reason - quiet as a mouse, just to sit at his feet and pretend to read the smallest of the difficult, dusty books from the shelf, a volume bound in red leather, with thick, creamy pages.  _That's a Latin grammar_ , his father told him once with a rare smile.  _Your great-great-great-grandfather's from before the War. You want to be a scholar when you grow up?_

_No,_ Arcade said stoutly.  _A soldier. Like you_.  _But I'll still read._  The big man laughed approvingly and Arcade felt he would burst with pride and happiness. He didn't have many moments like that in his life.

His grandparents, aunts, uncles, and all of the cousins he should have grown up with were dead - dead, his mother told him, because  _They_  hated us. Before he'd ever seen a map, before he knew just how much of a world there was beyond the walls of Navarro, Arcade knew that there was a terrible enemy out there. Knew that only his father's guns and Aunt Daisy's vertibird kept them from coming in  _here_. He had never seen an Outsider and didn't want to, either. They were dirty, ignorant, mutated savages who didn't belong with real people like himself.

When he was barely four, an older playmate told him that there were cannibals in the wastes, using vivid detail to paint a picture, and for an entire year after that, Arcade woke up, screaming, from nightmares in which they were devouring him alive. Only his father could convince him - temporarily - that his fears were groundless; his mother's assurances never carried the same weight. He could see that she was afraid too, of  _something_ , and he assumed that it was the sharp teeth and slavering jaws of the cannibals that frightened her as well.

After his father died, all of that stopped. The nightmares continued - became much worse, in fact - but he stopped screaming for help by sheer force of will. He'd lie in bed, eyes shut tight, frozen in fear, refusing to surrender to terror. Lost in her own dreams now, his mother would not come to him.  _He_  was the man of the house now. He  _would_  become a soldier one day - as soon as he could - and protect her. Protect their world. Just like his father had.

* * *

She was hurting her son. Knew it but couldn't do a thing about it. She didn't need the doctor's pointed hints ("He  _needs_  to play outside more, Miriam") to know that it was  _her_  fault that he was nearsighted - and at the age of four! He needed glasses, but there were none to be had. Not for a child. The materials, the artisans, and all of the complicated infrastructure for producing such luxuries had gone up in flames, and there'd been little effort to rebuild in the years since. Every resource had been diverted to producing and repairing weapons for the war effort.

She'd been ready to be a mother, or had thought so, anyway. But alone in a strange place, far from her family, she'd barely managed to tread water for the first few months, hanging onto the hope of her own mother's visit. Then, her entire world had been pulled out from under her and it was all she could do to survive. Four years of struggling, and still she fell short.

Sometimes Miriam wished that she had been with her family when they died. Sometimes, especially that first year, she wished that she didn't have an infant who depended on her. Things would have been simpler then. She said nothing of this to anyone, fearing that they would lock her up for her own protection and Arcade's. She wouldn't have been the first driven to the brink. Everyone was in a state of shock, even people like her husband, who'd lost no relatives and few friends. One family - a man, a woman, and their two children - were found dead in their home a week after the explosion. The couple had chosen not to live in a world without the Oil Rig, and had made that decision for their son and daughter as well. Miriam was appalled at the crime, but deep down she understood their choice.

But she would  _never_  hurt Arcade, not even to protect him from the future. Or so she told herself. She carried him everywhere she went for the first year, setting him down only reluctantly, never letting him out of her sight. When he starting crawling, she put up barriers in their sitting room to make a safe place for him to explore. Nothing could be safe enough, she found. One afternoon, when he was nine months old, he found and swallowed a button before she could grab it from him; for weeks after the danger had passed, she refused to let him out of arm's reach. But when he began to walk - and, importantly, when he began to show signs of vitamin D deficiency - she knew she had to do more to keep him healthy. Had to take him  _outside_.

She tried. Oh, she tried. Tried to translate the games of her own childhood for him, tried to imagine that the off-white picket fence framing their dust-bowl backyard was the reassuring walls of the playroom that she'd shared with her sisters. She helped him make mud pies, dig roads for his toy truck, and find bugs, and tried not to show him how terrified she was of having no ceiling but the bright blue sky. Her imagination showed her fallout raining down on him, settling on his bright blond curls. Worse than that, in her mind's eye, she saw the distant walls breached as enemies came storming in. Everywhere she looked, she saw disease and death for her baby. She never lasted more than an hour before she found she couldn't breathe for terror. The safety of being indoors was an illusion - the rational part of her mind knew this - but it was her only retreat all the same.

Only every other night - when her husband was home - could she feel something close to security. He might be distant and tired, but she knew he was trying to hold things together for the three of them. Every now and then, she saw a glimmer of the man she had married; in turn, she wondered if  _he_  still saw the woman he had fallen for in her.

Miriam didn't think very much about the mysterious invitation. Had heard about it, of course - everybody had within a few months - but she adopted her husband's line in rejecting it. It was too far a trip for too uncertain a goal. What if it was worse than this? It was better to stay here, as close as she could get to her lost childhood home.

* * *

The first time Israel heard about the voice on the airwaves, a month after the loss of the Oil Rig, he laughed. Bitterly. A trap. It had to be. Or a diversion - Maxson's army of techs could have bounced the signal around, making it  _appear_  to be from the distant east. Anything that drew off a significant portion of their forces, leaving Navarro vulnerable to attack, would be a win for their enemies. That alone made it a mistake to consider such a move. He refused to consider it seriously, and was thankful that the Enclave's depleted leadership appeared to be dismissing it as well. Chain of command aside, Colonel Autumn would have been no one's first choice for acting Commander-in-Chief, but he was at least a sensible tactician.

The second time it came up, a year or so later, it was from the lips of a friend - no, an  _acquaintance_ \- and he sounded brashly hopeful. Leonard Carrington, a burly mechanic who thought more with his hands than his head, was an associate of convenience, not of preference. Their wives were friends, their sons playmates. That was the only connection they had.

He held his tongue in the circle of men and women, all of whom had come to the commissary to collect their family's ration box for the week and then lingered to talk. He listened to them. He tried to understand their perspective - they were afraid, scarred by loss (as they all were), and desperately wanted something or someone to save them from their predicament. But for anyone to  _believe_  - as Carrington so confidently asserted to his hangers-on - that this John Henry Eden was anything but a convenient fiction was naivety of the highest order. Still, it wasn't his place to try to dissuade people from finding hope in obscure signs; he would save his comments for when it mattered.

An opportunity for such discussion came in the spring of '47, just a few weeks before Arcade's fifth birthday. The radio signal had never stopped; the voice had made its appeal a dozen different ways, as patient and confident as ever. For the survivors at Navarro, the situation was growing desperate indeed, so few soldiers remained to them now. While they didn't lose many people, the losses they did suffer were devastating to morale and security. Twenty-four hours on, twenty-four hours off, and still they could barely adequately patrol their holdings, which had shrunk to Navarro and its immediately vicinity. Young people were moved into training two years earlier than usual; older ones were recalled from retirement if they were still fit for active duty.

There was one bright spot in all this: driven by necessity, only a month after the loss of the Oil Rig, the powers-that-be gave Ebenezer Johnson a full pardon along with permission to rejoin Judah Kreger's unit, making it a little less of a skeleton crew. Eb was thinner and quieter, but took great pleasure in becoming an "uncle" of sorts to Arcade, and Israel was glad of their renewed companionship, even if it wasn't the same as before.

Four and a half years into the fallout from the disaster, talk of the invitation arose again in earnest, on a formal level. Autumn had announced a town hall meeting of sorts, down in the below-ground assembly hall. It wasn't an open forum, exactly - though it professed democratic principles, the Enclave preferred to take a more authoritative approach when it came to weighty decisions - but Israel's rank earned him a seat in the room. Walking in, he spotted Judah at the far end of the room and took an empty place beside him. It had been only an hour since they'd disembarked outside of the hangar at the end of yet another long circuit around their perimeter.

"Long time no see," the captain murmured, hiding a yawn. "Did you have a chance to go home before you came here?"

"Briefly." They'd returned from patrol several hours later than expected. Miriam had been asleep when he went to drop off his gear, and shower. Arcade was already in their bed, which is where he ended up most nights after waking from his nightmares. The sight of the two of them had spurred his resolve to come to this meeting despite his exhaustion. His family deserved to have a representative here.

Judah was watching Autumn up on the dais, a frown creasing his stern face. "Dawn has had enough of this, especially when she heard that Nicholas would be drafted on his next birthday.  _She'd_  hop in a vertibird with the kids tomorrow if it meant an escape from all this. She was furious that she couldn't come tonight. David's not senior enough to be here either, but he wants to be a part of the delegation that leaves, if and when that happens. Says he's old enough to make his own decisions." He grinned, a little painfully. "There's a girl there, of course. She feels the same way."

Though the separations of rank had broken down somewhat in the past few years, it was unusual for the taciturn captain to confide in a junior officer. It was either this display of confidence or weariness that made Israel forget his reserve at last. "Leave? For what? Empty promises with no proof - turning tail like we're  _afraid_  of that rabble? They're not getting through our lines this year, or the next, or the next… why should we give up a sure thing for a pipe dream? Burn up the last of our fuel on the word of a stranger?" His voice was too loud, and people around them turned to look.

Judah looked at him side-eyed, surprised at his outburst. "I think you need to sleep, lieutenant. Maybe  _don't_  talk anymore tonight if it's going to come out like that."

"Yessir. Sorry, sir. We all do." He ran a hand over his face, rubbing his eyes hard. He  _was_  tired. He'd spend the next twelve hours sleeping, and the precious time after  _that_  trying to be a father and a husband. Rinse and repeat. He was thirty-five, but felt much older. His schedule was a strain, of course, but not enough to account for his  _problem_. His heaviest burden was one he didn't even understand.

What Judah didn't know - what nobody knew, though both Daisy and Miriam had pestered him about the change they saw in him - was that Israel had left a part of himself behind that day at Arroyo, now almost five years ago. Or maybe it was just that a passenger had crawled into his head - the strange old man, now long dead. It was as if the witch doctor's dying curse had infected the part of Israel's mind that had previously been cool, collected, and calm, leaving a harmful resonance that chipped away at his surety and sanity.

What made it worse was that he could consciously remember only a part of what the old shaman had said. The incomplete prophecy overlay his dreams:

" _You have destroyed our homes, and thus you will lose both of yours. The cradle on the basin of tears, and the little refuge on its lip. You have killed… You have stolen children... Your son…_ "

_What_ about  _my son?_  he asked the voice furiously, tossing and turning in bed until Miriam shook him awake, eyes wide as she asked him what was  _wrong_.

He couldn't tell her. Part of it was because he really didn't know - when he tried to recall the specifics of his confrontation in the old man's jungle of a garden, he could recall only a grayish mist wrapped in dark green. And part of it was shame. He'd killed defenseless tribals that day - it hadn't been the first time, or the last - but the sequence of events had left a bad taste in his mouth. One side of him wanted to blame his friend for this. Eb's condemnation had forced Israel to confront himself, and what he found there he didn't like. They had never discussed that day, not even on the sniper's return, but it remained an unspoken barrier between them. One had done his duty, and the other had forsaken it, but Israel suspected  _he_  felt more shame than his friend did.

The long and short of it was that Israel was afraid. Felt that he'd already lost a battle that he had yet to fight, but was forced to go through the motions all the same. He wondered, in the quiet moments when he was alone, if the warning that he would lose his home compelled him to cling perversely to Navarro at all costs. That perhaps he could have listened to Eden's words with an open mind were it not for the goading voice in his head. This thought never lingered long. His motivations, desires, and commitments were his and his alone. He had to believe that.

He took Judah's advice and sat on his objections through the meeting, though he heard equally vociferous sentiments (on both sides) from men and women that looked as drawn and weary as he himself felt. In the end, little was decided, other than a new resolution that Autumn and the other leaders would begin submitting a series of questions to John Henry Eden for the first time. Up until this point, fearing a trap, they'd maintained radio silence for more than four years. Now, perhaps, it was worth learning more about the man who claimed to represent another lingering remnant of America's glory. Israel resolved to wait for the so-called president's answers and to bring a composed argument to the next meeting, one month from that day.

He would never have the chance.

* * *

Israel had fully intended to be home for Passover. Had made a rare special request months before that had - wonder of wonders - been granted. His off-day before the holiday was the happiest he could remember. Miriam actually sang as she prepared parts of the meal ahead of time, adapting the traditional recipes to their limited fare. Israel left the door to his study closed that afternoon, choosing instead to sit at the table and listen to his son practice reading the Seder questions aloud and helping with the pronunciation. That night, he and his wife made love for the first time in a very long time, and his sleep was for once undisturbed by spectral voices. He allowed himself to hope that they were finally coming to the end of a long tunnel, that whatever happened in the future, at least they'd be together.

His next shift passed quickly, aided by joyful expectation. Shortly before they were supposed to turn home, however, hours before his family expected him, their team received a priority message over the radio. A foot patrol had gone missing - a detachment of four, including David Kreger, Judah's older son. Daisy didn't wait for the order, but immediately turned their craft back to refuel. In the time that took, Israel sent a brief message to Miriam from the hangar terminal, conveying all the love and apologies he could fit into the textbox. Then they took to the air again and combed the wastes in a grid pattern, flying as low as they dared, until sundown left them with a quarter tank remaining. At that point, Daisy glanced back, a question in her eyes for the captain.

"One more hour," Judah said hoarsely. "Just one more hour, friends. Please."

It was Moreno who spotted it from his position on the right side of the craft. He pointed, calling out above the noise of the rotors, and soon they all saw where it lay, caught in the strobe pattern from their searchlights. It was a man, one of theirs by the clothing, limbs splayed out, armor stripped off and nowhere in sight. After a cautious survey of the area, Daisy set them down about twenty meters from the body.

Israel unbuckled his harness, but hesitated to take the lead. It was Judah's order to give. A heavy hand fell on his shoulder. "Lieutenant…" Judah's voice was pleading. Israel didn't need him to spell it out. He wouldn't have wanted to be the one to identity  _his_  son's body either.

"I'll do it."

He made his approach, trusting his fellows to watch his back, but still keeping a wary eye out lest their enemies had gotten smarter. Their sensors had detected no advanced technology other than whatever gear the dead soldier still had on him and no heat signature larger than a mole-rat for a quarter-mile in any direction, but it was always possible the Brotherhood had acquired stealth technology. Not likely, but possible. It paid to be cautious.

The man was certainly dead, but the cause wasn't clear at a glance. Israel knelt to turn him over, needing to see his face, and in a moment - as Daisy, trying to be helpful, directed one of the vertibird lights in his direction - he had his answer: it  _was_  Judah's son, barely eighteen years old. Attackers - it could only have been the Brotherhood of Steel - had burned David with laser fire, leaving his torso a charred and blackened ruin. The grief Israel felt for his captain was deep and sincere, but it was immediately swept away by fear when a final piece of information clicked into place. The boy had been lying on a pulse mine - an electronic signature that their sensors had noticed, but which they had interpreted as a communications device - and it was rigged to go off at the slightest change of pressure. Even as he watched, the bulb on the top of the device blinked a rapid countdown too fast to be an actionable warning.

Still kneeling, he turned his head back toward the vertibird, dimly grateful that the others had hung back, far out of range of the EMP burst. He wished he could connect with another person one last time. To shout the news to Judah, perhaps. To offer his consolations. To say goodbye to Daisy and Eb. To ask that they pass on his love to his family. Most of all, he didn't want to see the deadly charge arc out and attach itself to his chestplate, blasting through his protections and overwhelming the delicate electricity of his heart. He struggled to come to terms with this abrupt and pointless end, but found he couldn't. The time had run out.

_Last words. That's what people do, right?_  But he had nothing profound to say and no one close to hear it. He began anyway. "Miriam-"

Before a second word could pass his lips, there was a brilliant flash of light and then there was nothing, not even pain.


	5. The Limits of Endurance

"...You are the rearguard! The remnants! Though apart from you in flesh, we will be with you in spirit. Someday, east and west will join hands and together, we will dominate this country as we should. As is our right..."

Colonel Autumn was droning on and on, and the heat inside the hangar was oppressive, even with the enormous door wide open to reveal a field full of aircraft, fueled and loaded for imminent take-off. Arcade was tired of standing in one place, but there was no room to move, not even to swing his arms or walk around. He knew that it wasn't going to be over anytime soon - he'd been to two of these ceremonies in the past two years, after all, and the colonel was nothing if not long-winded. What made it worse was that he couldn't even see anything with all of the people packed around him. When he couldn't bear it any longer, he tugged on Daisy's sleeve to get her attention.

"I want to go outside," he whispered. He'd begged to come, just to get out of the house and spend time with his aunt and uncle, but now he'd changed his mind.

"Not  _now_ , Arcade.  _Listen_. You'll want to remember this someday." She didn't even look down at him. Her entire focus was on the unseen speaker.

Giving up on Daisy, Arcade squeezed between two old women in maintenance uniforms to get closer to Eb, who was leaning against the wall at the back and seemed to be half asleep.

"Uncle Eb, I really need to get out of here," he pleaded. It wasn't just the heat and the crowd that was choking him. It was the suffocating sadness of the crowd. No one laughed. No one murmured to his or her neighbor. No one even breathed loudly. There were no smiles in either group - not the people who'd formed a half-circle behind the dais nor the majority who would soon be left behind. On some, dim level, Arcade recognized that this day was significant - Colonel Autumn was himself leaving this time, after all - but he couldn't make himself care. Some other man in a uniform would be making decisions for them now. So what. It wouldn't affect  _him_  much.

Eb looked down at him with mournful, watery eyes and without a word he hugged him tight. Face pressed into the rough material of the man's coat, Arcade smelled cheap liquor. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he added another worry to the list. Worrying about grownups was something he took for granted. He always had.

At least Eb's voice sounded normal, if a little choked. "It'll be alright, boy. Don't be sad."

Disappointed and irritated at being ignored, Arcade turned away. He didn't try the other two. Orion would either cuff him or ignore him, and Judah scared him more than a little, especially lately. The people around him shifted a little then, opening up a temporary gap to the front. There, Arcade spotted Stanley standing beside his parents to the colonel's right, flight-suit ridiculously oversize and baggy. The older boy was biting his lip, scowling at at his feet. He looked up and for a moment, their eyes met. Stanley gave him a little wave and Arcade nodded back. Then, a tall man in the front shifted position, and his view was cut off.

Lonely and frustrated, Arcade rebelled. For the first time in his eight years, he willfully ignored rules and expectations, letting what he wanted take precedence over what others wanted from him. A side door near him was open in a futile effort to create a cross-breeze. Sidling along, moving slowly, he was able to slip out into the sunshine without anybody noticing.

Once outside, he ran, his thin-soled shoes carrying him down the empty streets and past the locked commissary. Every nonessential person was in that hangar. A lone guard in power armor called after him, but he didn't stop or look back. No one followed. Away from the center of base, there was no one at all to challenge him. For a minute, passing through the residential area, he thought about going home. His mother was there, waiting for him. She'd had a bad morning and refused to leave the house, even to see off their neighbors. She'd be fearful and lonely right now, he knew from experience. Arcade knew he could help her just by walking through the door, but something made him turn left instead of right, striking for the empty dunes on the unoccupied eastern side of the complex. He told himself he wouldn't be gone long, that she wouldn't expect him for an hour or more anyway.  _I need this_ , he told the shame that threatened to freeze him in his tracks.

Nothing would grow out here and the ground was too unstable for construction, but a generation of children had made it a place of their own. Sliding down the dunes on discarded sheet metal was good fun, and there was even a long, narrow clubhouse of sorts dug into the sand, with boards to hold its shape against the shifting drifts. Arcade used to come here a lot with older kids - when his mother would let him - but now there was almost no one left who was even close to his age. No big kids to tell him to go away. The base still had a few teenagers whose families had stayed behind, and a handful of much younger children. The playground was all his now.

Arcade crawled into the crude tunnel of the clubhouse, his earlier unhappiness giving way to cheerful satisfaction. This would be  _his_  place now. The ceiling had bowed slightly inward and there was scarcely room to sit up inside, so he lay down, smiling to himself and making plans. He'd clean up the sand that had spilled through the cracks and shore up the walls with bits of junk. He'd bring a lantern from home, and maybe a blanket and a book. If bad guys  _did_  come to Navarro, well, he and his mother could hide here together. He'd keep her safe in here. Maybe he could hoard some food and water when no one was watching… just to be prepared…

Lost in the fantasy and enjoying a rare moment of being the hero in his own story, Arcade fell asleep, unconcerned that less than a mile away were four adults who'd soon discover that he'd slipped out of the ceremony. Though he'd hoped to watch the take-off from the top of the dune, he missed this moment as well.

He awoke in time to hear them leave - he could hardly have slept through that - and was momentarily disoriented and confused when he found himself in a dark, uncomfortable, and  _very_  noisy place. Somewhere up above, vertibirds - eight of them - were passing over him, getting up to speed as they approached the edge of the base. Despite the muffling tons of sand above, he could feel the vibrations in the back of his head, rattling his teeth. The noise hurt his head, and the sudden realization of what it meant to be alone made his chest ache. Stanley was on one of those crafts. And Mrs. Carrington, who'd always been kind to him, feeding him, giving him Stanley's old clothes, and letting him stay when things at home were bad. And Judah's wife and son. For the first time, Arcade realized that everybody who remained had been left out of something important. No one else could leave Navarro easily. Even if they did, where would they go? The vertibirds that remained were short-range only. At best, they could make it a few hundred miles, which would land them in either deep desert or the edge of NCR territory. They were alone. Cut off from escape. His earlier happiness gone, he went back to the never-ending task of worrying.

He heard loud footsteps outside, heavy adult boots crunching through the top, crusty layer of baked sand at the mouth of the tunnel. One of the adults, come to take him home. He lay perfectly still, hoping that whoever it was would go away. It was probably Daisy, he decided, or maybe Eb. Still upset at both of them, he didn't want to talk to either right now. But the voice that spoke belonged to neither. It was the voice of authority, crisp and harsh.

"I can  _see_  your footprints, boy. Stop this foolishness and come out. That tunnel's not safe anyway."

Surprise made Arcade give himself away. "Judah? What are  _you_  doing here?"

"What do you think? Looking for you. Right now, Daisy's at your house, telling your mother that you're missing. You're giving her a scare. One that she doesn't need. What kind of son does that?"

Guilt and resentment twisted inside of him. He  _couldn't_  talk back to Judah, but there was no one else he could talk to either. Pretending like he was speaking to the cracked-board ceiling in front of his face, he let himself be honest for once. "So what? It doesn't matter what I do. She's  _always_  scared."

There was a heavy sigh. "Just come out, Arcade." Judah hesitated, then added reluctantly, as if unused to asking rather than ordering. "Please. You do  _not_  want me to drag you out of there."

Arcade crawled out on his hands and knees, blinking in the sunlight. His glasses had gotten dirty, but his attempts to clean them only smeared the dust around, as his shirt was in far worse shape. He tried to fix his mussed hair, and realized that his scalp was gritty with sand.

"I don't want to go back yet," he told Judah, meeting the stern gaze with all the courage he could muster.

"I know," Judah answered, surprisingly gentle for once. "But we all must do our duty, now more than ever. Before we go, however…"

He stood up, taking a piece of rebar in hand. Without any preamble, he attacked the boards framing the entrance to the hideout, prying them apart. Without their supporting structure, it caved in immediately, leaving a tangle of wood buried in a crush of sand. When he was done, he threw away his impromptu tool and looked down at Arcade, who had watched this act of destruction with mute outrage, fists clenched impotently. In five minutes, Judah had destroyed something precious to him and he didn't have the words to respond to that loss.

"Should have done that years ago. It wasn't safe," Judah told him, breathing heavily from the exertion. "I had forgotten about this place. I built it with my boys before you were born. Those boards were old and could have given out at any moment. You could have been killed. It was a bad idea to begin with."

Angry at the loss of his special place, the question was out of Arcade's mouth before he could stop it. "Why didn't you go with your family today?" The look on Judah's face - shock, anger, and grief - made him regret it immediately, but he made himself press on, his voice weak with hesitation. "Sorry, but didn't they need you?"

The answer was flat and surprisingly calm, though there was a steely undercurrent there. "That's my business, boy. Leave it. Let's go." Judah started to walk away.

Arcade called after the retreating back, his feet still rooted to the ground. "You shouldn't have stayed." His mixed up feelings made him bold. "It's wrong. No excuse makes this right. They're just like me and my mother now. Why would you do that?"

Judah wheeled and walked back to him and Arcade flinched when he crouched down and looked him in the eyes.

"Listen up, and I'll hear no more of this. From you or anyone.  _Ever_. Someone had to stay to protect the rest, do you understand? The vertibirds could only carry so many. You and your mother and all of the others need me more than Dawn and Nicholas do now. He's grown and she's… she blames me. For David." Arcade couldn't tell if Judah was asking for forgiveness or trying to pass on responsibility, but either way he was alarmed. He'd never seen the man so emotional. In three years, he had never heard him talk about the son he'd lost. The big hand on his shoulder was trembling, and he was relieved when the weight was taken away.

When Judah started walking again, Arcade followed without a word. He almost didn't hear the man's last words on the subject, an excuse mumbled to no one in particular: "Besides, they haven't spoken to me for over a year."

* * *

"He's here," Judah announced when they stepped across the threshold and walked toward the kitchen. The house seemed darker and smaller than before, and Arcade was suddenly ashamed to see it through outside eyes. Nothing was particularly clean or neat, and there was a definite odor to the place - the faint aroma of spoiled food mixed with the smell of something burnt. The latter was the result of Arcade's attempt at making lunch the day before. No one had cleaned the pan yet.

Daisy peered around the corner, her mouth set in a hard line. "Oh, thank goodness you found him. Arcade, what were you thinking? What got into you? When you said you wanted to go outside, I didn't think you actually  _would_."

His mother rushed in, pushing past Daisy and pulling him toward her. Again, Arcade was struck by a strange doubling in his perception - here was his mother, the way she always looked to him, but now he saw her as the others must have: a wild-eyed woman, still wearing her nightclothes in late morning, hair hanging loose and tangled. Ignoring Judah, she talked at him instead, "I shouldn't have let you go. I  _knew_  something would go wrong. See if I let them take you anywhere again…"

Embarrassed in front of the others, Arcade tried to escape the hug that went on too long, wriggling away. "Mom- please, mom.  _Stop_." Finally, she let him go, studying him with hungry eyes.

"I thought that horrible man had kidnapped you! He asked me to let you go, you know. Or Rachel - she had the nerve to ask if she could take you away from me, when I told her I wouldn't go. She said it was what was best for you and that I was selfish for keeping you back."

"The colonel wouldn't allow that to happen without your permission, Miriam. Arcade just wandered off to play, as kids do. He was never in any danger." Judah sounded exhausted.

"Wouldn't he, Judah?" she snapped back. "You're telling me the Enclave would never take a child, not even 'for his own good'?"

Arcade looked from his mother to Judah and back again. "What do you mean, mom?"

"Nothing," she murmured, eyes downcast. She stroked his hair and frowned at the sandiness. "It's nothing. Why are you so dirty, Arcade?"

"He was playing," Judah repeated in a hollow tone. He seemed to be studying the room, taking in the stains, the trash, and the plates left on the table from breakfast and last night's dinner. "Do you need help with anything, Miriam?"

"Judah," Daisy began, a clear warning in her tone, looking nervously at the other woman. "I think we should talk about this another time. It's been a hard morning already. Let's just go-"

"We don't need anything from anybody," his mother said firmly. "We're fine. Arcade is a good boy. He helps."

"He's  _eight_ ," Judah reminded her. "He's a  _child_. There's no shame in asking for assistance. Life's not going to get any easier from here on out. You don't have to do this alone. We always said we'd help you, for Israel's sake."

Arcade chafed at being dismissed. Without looking at Judah, he made his promise directly to his mother. " _I'll_  help you, mom," he told her. "Don't worry."

"I think you should move closer to the middle of town," Judah persisted, as if he hadn't spoken. "There are plenty of empty houses there now. You'll have neighbors who can keep an eye on you. You could evacuate to the bunker faster in an emergency. It would be safer."

Miriam stood and faced him, arms crossed over her chest. "I'll move over my dead body. Israel chose this place. We're not leaving it."

"I'm only saying…"

What Judah was saying, Arcade never heard. He had heard enough for the day. He walked away from his family and left them squabbling in the filthy dining room. Yes, it  _was_  his job to clear the table. But he'd been so excited for the outing this morning. And there'd been no soap to wash dishes with. His mother hadn't yet made it out of the house to collect their ration box for the week. He'd try harder in the future. Judah was right. She  _did_  need more help. He could do better. For right now, though, he needed an escape. There was one last place where he could be himself: his father's study.

No one except him had set foot in here for three years. His hands and feet had left the only marks in the dust, the streaks clearly visible where he'd climbed the bookshelves to reach what he wanted. When he closed the door behind him, he cut off the angry, fretful sounds behind him. Even though it was warm and musty inside the little room, where little or no air circulated in or out, it was better here than out there. Smelled less foul, too.

He stopped, as he always did, at the corner to the left of the door, where heavy boot prints stood ready for someone to step into them. Though the Tesla suit had long since been repaired, his mother had refused to let Daisy march his father's armor back into its place, and so the pilot was keeping it for him - as his inheritance, she said, no matter what his mother said. Arcade stood there for a minute, comparing the size of his own shoes with the indentations in the carpet. Someday, he'd be big enough to wear the armor. The others would teach him how to use it. And then he really  _would_  be like his father. There was nothing he wanted more.

The armor might be his, but the chair belonged to his father, even now. Arcade settled into his old spot on the floor with the grammar book he'd sworn to master no matter how long it took.  _Here_  was something that never changed, something he could hold onto for as long as he lived. No one would try to take it away from him because he was the only one around who could appreciate such things. It gave him a quiet pride that was all his own and no one else's.

He picked up where he'd left off the last time, studying the endless verb charts at the back of the book. " _Fero_. I endure.  _Ferebam._ I was enduring.  _Feram_. I will endure.  _Tuli_. I endured." He stopped and frowned, asking aloud, "Why did it change?" He shook his head, deciding that it was another arbitrary oddity of the language. "Anyway,  _tuleram._ I have endured.  _Tulero_. I will have endured…" He worked through the tables, impressing the building blocks of the language on his memory. Any questions he had hung in the air with no one to answer them, but he persisted anyway. Someday he'd understand  _everything_.

Outside the room, worried adults argued on. Far to the south, politicians and soldiers eyed the weak spots of a newly-vulnerable enemy. In the air to the east, one last wave of Enclave survivors set their sights on a new home. None of this signified anything to a little boy studying Latin while dreaming of being a soldier.


	6. Exodus

" _...for every one of theirs, we lost twenty of ours. Energy weapons, gas bombs, strafe attacks from above - even with a fraction of their fighting force, they were deadly. We lost a dozen more in the mop-up, mostly to women and children with guns. Whatever made them split their force, we owe our victory to that. All that to say: we cannot underestimate the danger that every loose end represents. They may return in force someday. We must remain vigilant and arm ourselves with the tools they left behind._

_**Record of prisoners taken alive (as of February 28):** _

_Enemy soldiers: five. (Note: two of these have since died of their wounds in custody.)_

_Non-combatants (age fifteen or older): twenty-six._

_Children (age fourteen or younger): three. (Recommend_ _cautious_   _rehabilitation.)_

_Number of escapees: Unknown. We put conservative estimates at around thirty. It could easily be much higher. We should give the Brotherhood fanatics all the cooperation they want in tracking these down._

_-Colonel Obadiah Grisham, Official Memorandum_   _re: survivors of Navarro_

* * *

February 21, 2252.

"He said to wait," Miriam whispered into the darkness, too quietly for Arcade to hear from the next room. "How long do we wait? How much longer  _can_ we wait?"

The last communication she'd received from command - a mass-message delivered to every active household terminal - had been alarming for its terseness:  _Store water. Keep the lights off. Stay inside._  A few hours after that, she'd received a personal message from Judah, instructing her to prepare a go-bag, and to  _wait_ , explaining that they would come for them when they could. Not long after that, the power had quit, followed shortly after by the water. That had been thirty-six hours ago and she couldn't hold out much longer for rescue. Another distant rumble of artillery fire - this one louder and more sustained that any before - made her decision for her. They would run. They wouldn't be here when the invaders moved on from the main threat.

She peered out through a chink in the blacked-out window. Almost night time again. When it was full dark, she and Arcade would slip out the back and break for the southern wall and find a way out. After that, they'd follow the coast south until they reached one of the cities she had seen on old maps. As a plan, it wasn't a very good one. She knew their chances of escape were slim, but she didn't know what else to do. There could be no more waiting for Judah or anyone else for a rescue. For all Miriam knew, her husband's former comrades were dead already.

By flashlight, she checked their bags for the twentieth time. Food. All of the water they could carry. Medical supplies. A change of clothes for each of them. Three of Israel's favorite books, Arcade's choice of the lot (a waste of valuable weight, she knew, but she couldn't bear to leave his entire library behind). Hers and Israel's wedding photo. A picture of Arcade as a baby. Letters from her mother. That was all they could afford to take with them from their life here. Everything else would have to stay behind.

Except for the pistol. Miriam didn't know much about the outside world, but she did know it wasn't a place to go unarmed. She ran her fingers over the weapon she'd just loaded with fresh charges - a plasma defender, top-of-the-line military-issue from before the War - and examined it distastefully. She would have to take it - it was a part of Arcade's inheritance, after all - but she didn't have to  _like_  it. Twice, Israel had made her shoot at targets with it, the second time just six months before his death, now almost five years gone. For her protection, he said. He had taught her how to reload and maintain it, not heeding her protests that she didn't like guns. Belated thankfulness mingled with bitterness. If only he were here now. Then she would feel like they had a chance.

"I've been trying, my love," she told him. She really had. From her lowest low of a crisis point a year and a half ago, she'd recovered to a more or less functional place. Out of necessity - every aspect of operations was  _so_  shorthanded - she'd returned to work in the medical center while Arcade attended school. A single room below ground had been sufficient to serve the handful of children remaining on base, and it was reassuring for her to know that he was safe there for at least part of the day. Slowly and painfully, goaded by guilt, she'd found her way out of the black cloud that had descended with the news of Israel's death.

She couldn't have done it alone and (thank God) she hadn't forced Arcade to shoulder the entire burden either. Once he saw how bad things had gotten, Judah had helped, as had Daisy. Even Eb had lent a hand in his sheepish, dazed sort of way, shuffling in at odd hours to take care of the heavy lifting of repairs and maintenance. All three of them had taken it in turns to give Arcade the sense of family that their miserable existence had lacked for so long. Once, a long time ago, she'd been a proud, independent woman. Miriam hated that she needed any help at all, but was grateful for it all the same.

In short, before recent events, things had gotten  _better_  than they had been. They had not been normal, however. There was no such thing as a normal life anymore - not for any of them. Discussions of a fourth wave of evacuations had gone nowhere, and communications with their eastern brethren had gone almost completely dark, with no forthcoming offer to return for the rest of them. The residents of Navarro were reduced to a skeleton crew whistling in the dark, hoping that none of their enemies noticed that they were wide open to attack. Those hopes had fallen apart one week before, when a distant scout had spotted a large ground advance creeping up from a city called San Francisco. Since then, Miriam hadn't seen a single soldier. They were all preparing to defend the heart of the base, with no one left for the perimeter. Too late, she regretted not moving closer when she had the chance.

"We should have gone with Autumn. Or I should have let Arcade go." The transport crafts had been able to take only so many. With her spotty mental health record, her lottery number for evacuation had been a bad one, and anyway she hadn't fought for a spot on one of the vertibirds. Nor would she surrender Arcade to another family. At the time, leaving had seemed much worse than staying put, but not anymore. Her fear and possessiveness may have doomed him.

Trying to cope with helplessness by doing  _something_ , Miriam was about to see if she could fit one more pair of socks into Arcade's pack when she heard a sound like someone talking, far away. She frowned. Could he be listening to the battery-powered radio in there? The airwaves - normally a source of entertainment and information - had been dead for over a day, but maybe command had resumed communications the only way they could.

Before she could investigate, a much louder sound came from her own front door - a muffled explosion and splintering wood, accompanied by male voices, loud and clear now.  _Someone_  was in the house with her  _son_. Protective fury overrode her timid nature. She took her husband's pistol in both hands and ran down the hallway, not caring if they - whoever  _they_  were - were armed. So was she.

What she saw appalled her through the sheer violation of the thing. A man in a dun-colored uniform, the a two-headed bear stamped on his back, knelt beside Arcade and the little lantern that rested by his elbow. The boy lay on the floor, looking up from his book with wide eyes, his too-large glasses sliding down his nose. The man was speaking to him in a low, soothing tones, "Come with me, son." He cocked his head and spoke to someone standing at the door, using the crisp tones of an order. "Clear the house."

She didn't remember aiming.  _Just point and squeeze_ , Israel told her, his big hands cupping hers.  _Repeat as needed_. The man at the door spotted her just in time to see his own death and the death of his companion. Leather and ceramic had almost no stopping power against plasma, especially not at this range. In a matter of moments, Miriam, who could never bring herself to so much as swat a fly, had killed two men, turning them into half-melted corpses on her living-room floor. She shot them each again, for no better reason than she needed to be  _sure_. Then she vomited.

"Mama?" Arcade whimpered, sounding much younger than he was. He hadn't moved. His reading material - a comic book she had told him he could not pack - still lay open in front of him. "You  _killed_  them."

She spat on the floor and straightened up. There would be others, and soon, though for now she heard nothing. Thank God the plasma pistol was quiet, though it was horribly messy. Would that green goo ever come out of the carpet?  _It doesn't matter, Miriam_ , she told herself.  _Get ahold of yourself_. They needed to get out of here. Her voice was stronger than she felt, though her hands were shaking as she reached for him with the hand not holding a gun. "Yes. We have to go now, okay? Out the back, through the fence, just like we practiced. Maybe Aunt Daisy will be there on the other side. Uncle Eb. All of our friends. Or new ones. Let's go, my love."

* * *

A few miles from the last row of houses, on a low hill that rose up from the sparsely-cultivated grasslands that rimmed Navarro's wide boundaries, lay part of the NCR camp. There was no fire or light among them - not even the glow of a cigarette. Too many vertibirds had dropped too many bombs in recent days for them to be anything but wary of making themselves an easy target from above. Colonel Grisham had promised severe reprisals to any man he caught lighting up, though God knew this group needed whatever comfort it could get. Many of his men had been drafted straight from their farms less than a year ago, in preparation for this campaign, as well as the ongoing struggle against hostile tribals in the new, northern territories. They were soldiers in name only - before now, they'd never been in a real fight against a organized force - and he feared mutiny if conditions didn't improve soon.

A prolonged siege against a cornered and dangerous enemy had brought heavy losses for the NCR and their allies - the Brotherhood of Steel for the heavy lifting and various tribal hangers-on for backup. It had ended in bitter-tasting victory with the last of the Enclave defenders bringing their underground complex down upon their own heads in suicidal defiance, crushing many of the attackers in the process and burying a irreplaceable fortune of technology under countless tons of rock and earth. Grisham's superior had estimated that fewer than two dozen enemy soldiers had escaped the explosion, and there'd be fewer still alive by sunrise once the Brotherhood had finished clearing the other administrative buildings. Operation Navarro had been a much-needed success - and a relief to everybody who had spent years fearing the eventual return of the Enclave - albeit a costly one.

Two days they'd been in this godforsaken place. That was two days of fighting human monsters in bug-masks, and two days of being on the receiving end of weapons they'd never seen before. Only now was there time to rest, count their dead, and lick their wounds while fresh reinforcements did the house-to-house searches. Still, they had a job to do out here, and Grisham knew he couldn't afford to relax yet. Blinking the sleep from his eyes - he'd had two hours of shut-eye and it would have to be enough - he stood to speak to the man on watch, who had his night vision binoculars fixed on something out in the gloom.

"What have you got, Corporal Carver?"

The younger man jumped as if he'd been caught in some guilty act, but he made his report promptly. "A woman and a young boy. Civilian dress. Running south."

"No such thing as civilian treatment for these people. That's official policy." His dry throat cracked on this order and he took a swig from his canteen before continuing. "Do they see us?"

"No sir. They'll pass us a quarter mile off. We've got the advantage of elevation. Do you want Lucerne to take the shot?" Grisham noticed that Carver's voice was shaking slightly.

Grisham rubbed his temples. His headache was no better for the brief rest. He wanted to be far away from this place and the decisions he'd been forced to make. He had his eye on a promotion - everyone knew it - but had hoped to earn it against one of the the loose confederations of hold-outs against civilization, not against the Enclave. "Negative. We've got a human net miles long along the wall. All those tribals are good for something, at least. Nothing bigger than a mole-rat is getting through without raising an alarm. The child could be one of the ones Tandi's golden boy was going on about at the last council meeting. One of 13's missing kids. Either way, it'll be easier to reeducate him if we don't shoot his mother in front of him. They'll take her out of sight first."

"Affirmative, sir." The watchman, a young man with two days of stubble on his broad, open face, swallowed. "Sir… the kid… that woman… they  _are_  innocent, aren't they? She mightn't have known. My wife doesn't know the half of what I do out here. Maybe-"

Grisham cut him off with all of the harshness he could muster.  _Time to nip this in the bud, and hopefully save this boy from a lifetime of regrets._  "Carver, that kind of sentimental thinking will get you killed out here. The Enclave was a machine that needed every part working to operate. It doesn't matter if she was a scientist, a paper-pusher, or a housewife. She was as complicit as any of their fighters. We can't afford to take chances. Do you understand? That woman, her husband if he's still alive, and maybe that goddamned kid are  _dangerous_ , even now. We're not risking a clean win for mercy. That's a luxury for politicians in peacetime. Not for us."

The younger man stiffened. "Yes sir. I'm sorry, sir. It's just… I have a son too. I see my family in them."

"There's your problem, soldier. They're  _not_  like us. Dismissed."

* * *

There had been a time in Arcade's life when he would have given almost anything to go up in a vertibird with Daisy and her friends. In his daydreams, they'd run into trouble halfway through the flight - monsters or bad guys or sometimes aliens to mix it up a little - and he'd pick up an extra gun and use it to save the day. Then everyone would see how  _brave_  and  _strong_  he was and appoint him the youngest soldier in Enclave history. It was his favorite fantasy.

Now that he finally had his wish, fleeing through dark and danger with everybody he knew, he found that he couldn't even lift a finger. He was freezing and numb and floating somewhere apart from his body. One hand was frozen around the strap of the pack he'd carried all those miles through the desert and the other held his mother's hand, as if he'd lose her if he'd let go. He found himself breathing hard as if they were still running across rough ground, his body shaking in time to the vibrations of the craft, and every slight turn and bank of the vertibird convinced him that  _now_  they were going down, that the bullets which had rattled over the skin of the craft had damaged some vital piece of it. It was the worst nightmare of his life and he was awake for it. Sort of.

Things had gotten jumbled and hazy in his head in the past few hours. A handful of details stuck out in brilliant color in an otherwise grey-tinged memory. His comic book was  _still_  on the floor at home, and now the hero, the Silver Shroud, would always be suspended above a vat of acid. That upset him a lot for some reason. Two dead men lay there as well, and that bothered him too. He'd ripped his jacket crawling under the fence to get out of his backyard, and there was a scratch on his back to match. After that, there was only a long stretch of unremarkable monotony. One minute, they were trying to run over uneven ground, with rough, thorny plants tugging at their legs. It was dark and cold and and a stone had gotten into his shoe, but he knew they couldn't stop to get it out. The next minute, they were stumbling up a ramp and onto the vertibird that had appeared out of nowhere with dimmed lights but an unmistakable clatter. Daisy hadn't even waited until they'd found a seat before she'd taken off again. After that, there had been more shooting - out of the corner of his eye, he saw Orion jump on the minigun to answer it - but by then Arcade had seen and heard enough. He decided to stop worrying and let the grown-ups have a turn for a while.

The arm around him tightened and his mother's voice - calm and strong, despite everything - washed over him, thawing the ice inside slightly. "Don't be afraid, Arcade. It's alright now. We're alright. See? Open your eyes."

He did - just a little - peering at a dim, blurry space through tiny slits. Dark, vaguely familiar figures sat around looking at him. He blinked, but the world stayed out of focus. "Where are my glasses?" He  _couldn't_  lose them - he'd been told that often enough - but now they were gone. Guilt added another layer to his misery.

"We'll find another pair for you. How are you feeling?"

This was a difficult question to answer through the strange exhaustion that had swallowed him. His legs ached from running so far, but that was a distant, irrelevant pain. His head and eyes burned from unshed tears, but he couldn't have cried if he had wanted to. Not in front of the others. He had his pride. "I'm really tired, mom."

"Lie down, baby. Here." She moved to the side, untangling him from herself and making room for him to lie back, but not letting go of the hand that had a deathgrip on her own. He heard her talking, polite and fearful at the same time. "Orion, could you please…? That blanket. He's in shock."

One of the shadows stepped near, the heavy fall of metal and the smell of oil reminding him of his father's late night returns from patrol. A warm, heavy weight of cloth enveloped him as he heard the big man's harsh whisper from above his head, a line that would echo in his thoughts for years to come. "Kiss America goodbye, boy. It's all gone now. You'll be the last of us."


	7. The Fathers Eat Sour Grapes

_August 4, 2260_

"Where are you going?" His mother, her tone fractious with worry, managed to make the question sound like an accusation. "I thought you had to study."

"The term doesn't start for two weeks. I've  _been_  studying. And I'm going out."

"Dressed like  _that_?"

He looked down at himself. The gray suit he'd borrowed from a slightly-wealthier classmate was about an inch-and-a-half too short on the cuffs, and slightly threadbare to boot. It was, nevertheless, much nicer than anything he owned. "What's wrong with it?" he asked, exasperated.

"You'll be mugged before you get half a mile. Are you taking your pistol?"

_No_. "Of course. Mom, don't worry about me. It's just a graduation party. It's not far. I'll be back in a few hours."

She was quiet for a minute, then hugged him, so tightly that he could feel her trembling. He hugged her back, worrying about how small and  _fragile_  she seemed to him now. He'd passed her in height many years ago, and she'd seemed to shrink in the same timeframe, worn down by the stress of life and work in the city. She'd never sought after new relationships or friends, and seldom spoke to anyone she didn't have to. All she had was him and that usually made him exceedingly careful. Tonight, however, it only made him feel anxious and irritable.

"Be careful." She released him and stepped back, hands clasped in front of her. "I know it's none of my business, but have you made your decision yet? I know I never joined, but you shouldn't let that stop you. It's entirely your choice."

He kept his reply short, resenting the pressure and knowing that he needed to be on his way. "Not yet." And then he was off, out on the darkening streets, going to a party he had no business at, where he'd be accompanying a person he had no interest in. At least he could move with confidence through the city. If he belonged anywhere, he supposed it was here. It  _had_  been more than eight years, after all. He'd gotten an education here, in more ways than one, beginning shortly after they'd left Navarro.

* * *

Rapid urbanization. That was a buzzword from the Followers' constant lectures on the ongoing project of reconstruction, the mission that so preoccupied Arcade's educators. As a child, Arcade didn't know how it helped knowing the phrase to describe why they had to share the city with a million people, and why it smelled so terrible - the accumulating waste of the masses had outpaced the NCR's attempt to rebuild a functional sewer system from the ruins of the old.

People poured in from the countryside, flocking to the burgeoning nation's offer of stability and protection, and it was more than the administrators of Angel's Boneyard had expected. Tensions ran high, particularly when food or water ran short, or the summer heat made the streets stink to the high heavens. That's when the soldiers began to patrol the streets in force, to stop serious trouble before it began.

Arcade never got used to them. Never felt safe in their presence. NCR khaki and Brotherhood chrome were the same to him - both had the same, terrible associations of death, loss, and danger. In his mind, if they were to notice him at all, they'd read his crime on his face. Hadn't his family told him - again and again - that they'd arrest him at the slightest suspicion? Hadn't they killed his father and invaded his home? He could never trust his enemies to treat him well.

One day, when he was eleven, a sweaty, red-faced trooper pulled him clear from a food-riot in the marketplace. He was struck dumb, more afraid of his savior than of the flailing clubs and fists of the wild mass of starving people behind him. When the man let go of his arm, Arcade raised his hands in surrender, not taking his eyes off the rifle on the soldier's back. The man gave him a push with his big, coarse hands instead.

"Wassamatter witcha, kid? You wanna get et? Run home. Stay off the streets."

Arcade ran, shaking from his near-escape. Maybe they  _couldn't_  tell what he was. Maybe, as long as he kept his mouth shut, he'd be safe.

* * *

Some things he had to learn in the classroom, of course. One lesson in particular always stuck in his mind with horrible clarity.

He remembered, very clearly, leaning over his pre-war geography book, using his finger to chart a course from Los Angeles to the old Capital. It didn't seem that far to him. When he was grown - something that seemed all-too-faraway at twelve - he'd find a way to go.

And just like that, he was on the road going east. Through deserts, over mountains, and through forests he marched, his father's armor like a house on his back. His people would welcome him with open arms. He'd persuade them to send a vertibird back for his mother and the others. Then, they'd all be together in a safe place, far from their enemies.

His teacher derailed this fantasy with a departure from the usual lesson plan, "Today, we will be learning about the crimes of the Enclave…"

These words cut through the haze of heat, sweat, and exhaustion that always hung over the classroom by mid-afternoon. Arcade sat up as if he'd been stung by a bee. He realized a second too late that obvious interest was bad.  _Very_  bad. Many of the students didn't come back after the lunch break, and those that did were usually there because they wanted to learn. Still, by 2 PM the class was half-asleep and sluggish - some hungry, some ill, and all tired - and rapt attention  _would_  be noticed.

He swallowed the fear that had jumped into his throat, and tried to keep his face blank.  _I know all about this already_ , he reminded himself.  _More than that, I know about the crimes against_  us _._ The NCR and the Brotherhood had killed his father; soldiers had come in the night for Arcade and his mother. Only good luck had saved their lives - and only continued secrecy would keep them safe.

"The Enclave engineered deadly viruses for mass dissemination, slaughtered civilians… experimented on prisoners, stole children. Their immoral use of technology - including weapons of mass destruction - represented the single greatest threat to peace and civilization since the War. None of us would be alive today if they had succeeded in their plans. They called themselves America's heirs, and in a way, they were: they carried on the worst of that nation's sins."

_Lies_ , Arcade sneered inside.  _Propaganda to justify their actions._  But as the lecture went on, he grew more uneasy. Ms. Francoise - a Follower through and through - was no NCR spokeswoman. Why would she repeat these things if she didn't have good reason to believe them? He needed to talk to his mother. She would straighten everything out for him. Would tell him again how his father was a hero. Then everything would be alright again. He raised his hand.

His teacher stopped, frowning at him. "Did you have a question, Mr. Gannon?"

"Miss, I don't feel well. May I be excused for the day?"

She studied him, used to excuses from her pupils, then softened. "You  _do_  look pale. Yes, run along. We'll be covering more of this on Monday."

As it turned out, his rebellious stomach wouldn't let him be a liar. Halfway home, he had to duck into an alley to vomit.  _Nerves_ , he told himself, spitting bitter-tasting bile on the ground. He wouldn't allow himself to admit what he half-believed already: that every word spoken against his people was true.

In his haste to escape the classroom, Arcade had forgotten that his extended family would be in town for the weekend. He opened the door with a crash and the sight of five people in his home instead of one gave him pause for only a moment.

Fixing his eyes on the person whose answer meant the most, he blurted out the all-important question, "Mom, is it true what my teacher said? Did we… did the Enclave hurt people who didn't deserve it?"

She looked away, fumbling nervously with a torn seam on their sunken couch. "Close the door, Arcade. And keep your voice down."

"What kind of school are you sending him too, Miriam?" Orion, appearing almost a stranger out of uniform or armor, was openly indignant. "I know he needs an education, but at what cost? Boy, don't listen to your teacher. She doesn't know what she's talking about. Probably never seen anything but this shithole of a city."

Out of the corner of his eye, Arcade saw Eb put his face into his hands. Feeling frustrated, he asked the room again, feeling increasingly desperate. "But did we… did  _you_  do those things?" He tried to remember everything he'd heard and seen today before his flight. "Poison, experiments, viruses, bombs."

Judah spoke next, slow and tired, not trying to deny it. "It was war. We lost. History is written by the winners."

Not content with truisms, Arcade turned to the woman perched on an ottoman near their only window. "Daisy? My dad wasn't at Arroyo, was he?" Ms. Francoise had shown them pictures of that place - an insignificant tribal village - and the blackened bones of its occupants, taken not long after… whatever had happened there had happened.  _Say he wasn't_ , he begged her silently.

Daisy flinched, but held his gaze steadily. "Yeah. We all were, honey."

As if they'd rehearsed their answers, they went around the room, telling their versions of that day. Daisy told him about the flight, about the terrain she'd seen from the cockpit. Judah described the strategy and the rationale for the attack, in the calmest and most deliberate language that put the events of that day at arm's length. Orion blustered on at length about the degraded pedigree of their opponents. Eb said nothing, but only looked at him, as if making a silent appeal to him - to what exactly, Arcade had no idea.

At the end of the afternoon, Arcade came away with the answer that yes, the Enclave had done all that people said and more, but that it was a harsh necessity. A part of life as it had been. Only Moreno kept his answer simple and unapologetic. Arcade envied him that confidence and pride, and wished he had a fraction of it. It was this desire - this desperate need to be proud of  _something_  - that eventually got him into trouble, and almost led to disaster for them all.

* * *

From the crack under the door, he could hear them talking. Talking about  _him_.

"...he's bright but…"

"...mother makes no friends…"

"The  _things_  he knows!"

Arcade waited on the bench outside the school administrator's office, fists clenched in anger inside too-large sleeves, body trembling with fear. Such strong impulses warred for control in his mind - pride, grief, and guilt chief among them - that self-preservation and self-control had lost. He wondered if he should run. There was no guard at the door. He could be home in ten minutes. And then what? Where would they go?

_You must not tell_. That had been his first lesson on the outside, and it was the hardest to live out. What had his teachers seen this time, that he was sitting here again? Something he'd written? Something he'd said? Had some look or reaction betrayed their secret at last?

The door opened. Ms. Francoise, his history teacher, came out. "You can come in now, Arcade. Don't be afraid." Her pinched, old-woman's face seemed incapable of smiling, but she made a quick, nervous effort for him.

_Oh no. Why be afraid? I know what awaits. Reeducation camp for me. The firing squad for her_.  _Mother, I'm so sorry._

Dr. Rundstrom was talking, and he'd missed the first part. "What?" he blurted out.

The middle-aged principal regarded him sternly across the desk. "I was asking for your age, Mr. Gannon."

"Thirteen last May. Sir."

"Your teachers -  _all_ of your teachers - tell me you're unusually bright. Advanced. That you know the material before they teach it. Your mother must be a good teacher." Seeing Arcade's look of confusion, he clarified. "That's good, boy. You'll go far with your ability if you continue to train it. Where are you from, Arcade?"

This segue caught him off guard, but not for long. He recovered quickly and begin reciting the old lie.

"I was born in Klamath before it was incorporated. My father was a caravan guard who was caught in a gang crossfire outside of New Reno. My mother and I came to the Boneyard afterwards in search of a home…" He laid out these details with such practiced ease that it sounded genuine even to his own ears, but when he finished, Dr. Rundstrom wasn't satisfied.

"Yes, yes, boy. I have that all in black and white in your file. I just thought that maybe, here, among the three of us, you would have more...  _details_  for us. The truth, perhaps. It need go no further than this office. We - Ms. Francoise and I - only want to help."

"I don't know what you mean, sir." He kept his face smooth and innocent, eyes wide behind his glasses. Inside, his heart was pounding so loud that he was sure the other two could hear it.

"I read your essay, Arcade," Ms. Francois spoke up in the chair beside him. She held up the paper, written in his careful, neat script. "On the NCR-Brotherhood treaty. I wanted to give you a chance to re-write it. I don't want this in your permanent file. Not as it is."

"What's wrong with it?" His voice was too loud. He thought he might faint, or grab for the paper and run out the door. He knew exactly what was wrong with his essay. The tone of it had been a mistake. But it had been  _honest_. Foolhardy, but honest. They had killed his  _father_...

"Your camouflage is slipping, boy," Dr. Rundstrom told him. "You can't write or talk like this. Not from that perspective. People will suspect."

"Suspect what, Dr. Rundstrom?"  _Don't goad him, you idiot!_ he screamed at himself.

The man sighed, flipped the paper over, and slid it toward him. "I'm not going to dignify that with a response, Mr. Gannon. As the saying goes, 'speak the devil's name and he shall appear.' I'm not going to do that. As punishment for this paper, you will re-write it into an appropriately neutral one, as befits a scholar of any age. Better yet, choose a different subject. I'm told that the early life of President Tandi is a fascinating subject for study. You will also come to my office for half an hour after school for a week and we will talk about your future. Do I make myself clear?"

There was a strange rushing noise in his ears. "Yes, sir. So you're… not going to tell anybody?" He turned to Ms. Francoise. "Either of you?"

Dr. Rundstrom shook his head. "The Followers of the Apocalypse are not in the habit of punishing children for the sins of their fathers. You have nothing to fear from us. But you  _do_  have to be more careful. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he whispered.

"Then go back to class. And please… don't give us a reason to regret our actions today."

* * *

"Again, boy. And don't look at me like that! Sergeant Dornan wouldn't have been any nicer about this."

Wondering how Orion knew that he was glaring at him, Arcade gritted his teeth and tried - for the third time - to force his limbs through the series of challenges that the others had set up for him.  _Run. Jump. Crawl. Shoot. Halt._ He was never graceful, even at the best of times, and the suit amplified his awkwardness further. He could get the arms and legs moving inside the suit, with a little effort, but he couldn't stop on a dime like the others.

He shuddered to a stop in front of his least patient teacher, skidding just a few feet past his mark. The big man checked his watch and shook his head. "Have you forgotten everything you learned last summer? What's the point in doing this if you're just going to moon over your books fifty-one weeks out of the year?"

"What  _is_  the point in doing this, Orion?" Arcade grumbled. "It's not like I'll ever get to use it." At fifteen, the previous summer, he'd ignored his mother's tearful objections, leaping at the chance to go on a camping trip with what remained of the Devil's Brigade. At sixteen, a year later, he'd been just as eager to leave the city behind for a week, but his enthusiasm for wearing the armor was waning. He had the height for it now, but he didn't have the heart. Or the skill, as Orion had told him, many, many times.

"Never mind that. Your father would want you to be prepared. I'll do my duty by you." He paused, then added. "And you  _will_  call me 'Moreno' or 'sir." I'm not your friend.  _Again!_ "

Hours later, weapons laid aside and armor carefully concealed in packs, the five of them sat by the fire, a lonely spot of light and warmth on the lonely stretch of coast the group had taken to visiting each year. From here, Judah had explained the previous year, you could almost see where the Oil Rig had once been. It was a much-needed annual respite from the menial jobs they'd taken to working on the edges of civilization. More than that, it gave them a chance to talk freely about where they had come from, without worrying that a neighbor or coworker would hear.

Arcade enjoyed these nights, at least at first. They gave him a sense of belonging that he hadn't felt for a very long time, but they also made it harder for him to return to life as usual. They nurtured the tiny seed of resentment that told him that he deserved better out of life, that he  _was_  better than the common lot. Orion… Moreno seemed to think so, but was this the man he wanted to be like? He didn't think so. Moreno was living in the past. He was coarse, unhappy, and rude. Without the Enclave, he didn't seem to have anything left but memories - not that these brought him any joy. Not even here. A few drinks in, and he was angry, growing louder and louder as the evening wore on. When he started shouting, Arcade walked away, leaving Judah and Daisy to talk their old comrade down, while Eb poked aimlessly at the fire.

He sat on a rock and watched the waves come in, washing up and fading just short of his feet. Tiny clams and crabs dug in and out of the wet sand and their industry fascinated him. He wished he could have come here when he was younger - lived out here, even, away from the stink of the city. As it was, though, the wide-open spaces and the solitude made him uncomfortable. He was always uncomfortable, though, no matter where he went. That seemed to be his natural state of being.

"Is this seat taken?"

Arcade jumped. It was Eb - Eb who had hardly said a word to him in three days - motioning at a damp patch of sand. Without waiting for an answer, the big man flopped down on the wet ground and looked out over the water.

"I wasn't born into the Enclave, you know," he told the waves, so quietly that he almost seemed to be talking to himself.

Arcade  _hadn't_  known this. He couldn't remember the last time the man had told him anything. If the loss of their home at Navarro had made Orion louder, it had had the opposite effect on Eb. He had retreated into himself, leaving almost no trace of the kindly uncle Arcade remembered from his early childhood. "Where  _are_  you from?"

Broad shoulders hunched forward as if he were trying to make himself small. "It doesn't matter. I barely remember it - some long-gone tribe, somewhere to the east. Forty years ago - this was pre-Richardson, you understand - there was a 'rehabilitation' program. And… it doesn't really matter. I was a child. The point I'm trying to make is that there  _are_  alternatives in any life. Where you came from shouldn't define every step you take. Especially if going back isn't an option."

This was, by  _far_ , the longest speech Arcade had ever heard the taciturn man utter, and it gave him the encouragement he needed to ask the question that had been eating at him. "If my father had survived, what do you think he would be doing right now?" His thoughts and memories of his father were all blurry and jumbled up with the bad experiences which had followed his death. He remembered his height, his voice, his armor, and little else.

Eb was quiet for a long moment, turning a piece of driftwood over in his hands. "I think he'd be with you and your mother, building a new life somewhere. Not mooning over the wreckage like the rest of us. He had it in him to be better than the Enclave gave him room to be. Maybe we all did."

This was the closest anyone had come to admitting to Arcade that his father hadn't been a saint and he wasn't sure if he wanted to know more. "I always wanted to be like him," he confessed tentatively. "But I don't know what that means anymore. Or if I should even try. If he really did do those things…" He trailed off, hoping to hear an answer that would exonerate the man he barely remembered.

"Make no mistake: he did. I watched him." Eb bowed his head. "Tried to stop him once. He didn't understand, not then or later. Maybe… maybe if we'd had that conversation ten years before Arroyo, away from the smoke and screams and spears, he would have listened. He was smart. He'd read  _all_  the books, just like you, and could talk your ear off with ideas. I don't know how he ended up with the same answers as Moreno in the end, but he did… not as brutal, but still the same."

Anger like he'd never felt before coursed through Arcade, and before he knew it, he was standing, soft hands curled into fists. This was nothing compared to his irritation with Orion - he wanted to smash Eb's sad, hangdog face, to blot it out altogether. "Why tell me?" he choked out. "You could have sold me the same line as everybody else. I would have believed it.  _Wanted_  to believe it.  _Why_?" He was almost shouting now. Somewhere in the background, Moreno's yelling and the others' murmurs fell silent for a moment, before resuming.

"Because I want you to be like the man he could have been, not like the man he was. For that, you need the truth. I'm sorry, boy."

He tried to get control of himself. " _No_ , they were dirty, backwards trib-...  _savages._ Mutants, not people. They needed to be wiped out. They were enemies in wartime. A threat…" In his mind's eye, he saw animals, their features bestial, their bones inhuman, their deaths inconsequential.

Eb let him talk himself into silence before he spoke again, his voice kind and gentle, with no hint of a reprimand. "You weren't there - this was before you were born - so you don't know. They were people, just as much as every other person you've met. Men, women, and children. People who had never seen monsters like us before. People armed with sticks and stones. It wasn't a battle like you're imagining. It was a massacre."

Though he was shaken by this image, Arcade wouldn't let it go. "How can you sit there and judge my father? You were there. You're just as guilty."

Chin tucked to his chest, Eb shook his head. "I didn't fire my gun that day. I disobeyed orders, there and at Vault 13. I paid for it… but not enough. You're right. I  _am_  guilty. I chose cowardice over doing the right thing. My only defense is that… I thought it was better that I should survive. As if  _I_  could be an example to others." He looked up and Arcade was horrified and disgusted to see tears glinting under the scraggly hair that had fallen into the weathered face. "I kept time in a system where my friends were killers and I allowed them to be. You can blame me if you want, if it helps you."

Arcade sat down again, still hating Eb, but too depressed to act on it. "If you want to help me... to make me okay with all this, give me something I can hang onto. Something that doesn't add up to 'Israel Gannon was an evil man and deserved to die.' I need a father like that, even if he wasn't real."

"The kid I knew in school was kind and intelligent," Eb began, slowly and carefully. "The man whose wedding I was at would have done anything - and I do mean anything - for his family. The soldier I fought with was loyal and brave. If he hadn't been in the Enclave, I believe he would have been a good man. If he had lived to join us out here, I believe he would have become a better one. As it was, he wasn't  _all_  bad - like most of us, he was complicated. I know that's not what you wanted to hear, boy… but it's true. That's the best I can give you."

Arcade didn't trust himself to speak, not even to deny or rage against the unwanted revelation. Without another word, he stalked to his sleeping bag, jammed his fingers in his ears to blot out Orion's ranting, and pretended to go to sleep. A little while later, he heard Daisy bend down and whisper, "Alright, honey?" He didn't move, and soon she went away. He lay awake for a long time, weighing lies against truth.

By the time the sun was up and Orion was back to playing drill sergeant (with Judah standing by to offer some more helpful advice), Arcade had unmoored himself somewhat from his origins, but still had a father he could accept on some level. On the way home, he tried to thank Eb - after avoiding him for days - but the words caught in his throat. In the end, he could only manage a promise: "I'll do better."

* * *

_August 4, 2260_ (cont.)

_Why_  he'd decided to attend the cotillion was a question for the ages. He was eighteen - officially an adult - and he found himself lost in a strange, transitional limbo. It'd been two weeks since graduation and he was still dragging his feet over committing himself formally to the Followers of the Apocalypse. He wasn't sure why he was hesitating, except that he still didn't know who he wanted to be. He could continue his studies either way, but everyone expected him to take vows. He was one of them, in all but name, and the Followers did  _not_ , as a rule, hobnob with the upper echelons of society, except to solicit donations for their humanitarian work. But attend he did, in a borrowed suit that appeared shabby in the midst of the finery of the others present.

_How_  he'd gotten in the door was easier to answer: one of his casual acquaintances from secondary school, an aspiring chemist who just happened to be the late President Tandi's great-grandniece, had sprung the surprise invitation on him at the end of their last class together. Arcade hadn't known how to decline politely. Later in life, maybe, he'd perfect the art of shooting down the advances of the women who came, drawn to his height and looks like moths to a flame. At eighteen, however, he was young and insecure and closeted, and Suzanne Deschamps had a way of getting what she wanted - in this case, a poor but handsome young man on her arm at the social event of the year. Part of him, too, was curious. For these reasons, he'd said "yes."

They met at a public square a few blocks from the gala, which would be held at the mayoral mansion. Getting there - getting there  _alone_ , especially as night was coming on - wasn't exactly safe, and Suzanne had told him explicitly not to come armed. "There'll be guards," she had told him with a laugh, as if his follow-up question was ridiculous. He wondered if she'd ever been to the bad side of town, let alone to the free clinic that his mother still worked at after all these years. He'd urged her to move many times - there were other hospitals and better lodgings to be found - but Miriam had remained the same nervous person as she'd always been, with caution teetering on paranoia. She wanted to stay below the radar, at any cost. Arcade was glad there was no need for her to ever meet Suzanne; he wasn't sure he could have bridged that gap. In the unlikely event that he ever brought anyone home to meet her, it would be someone closer to their own class. He wasn't even sure that his mother knew he was gay; they never talked about such things, and he was in such a habit of keeping secrets that it seemed natural to add one more.

Though he hadn't wanted to admit it at home, his fancy clothing  _did_  make the walk more dangerous. To compensate, he kept a fist jammed inside the suit pocket the entire way there, fingers wrapped around an invisible gun. His whole attitude said "I belong here," or at least he hoped it did. At any rate, he met no trouble.

Suzanne was waiting for him under the newly-unveiled statue of the Chosen One, whose recent death had catapulted him into semi-mythic status as far as the NCR was concerned. Arcade had seen the man himself once, at a distance, but couldn't have said whether the image was a good likeness. He knew now everything there was to know about the so-called hero's connection to the Oil Rig, Arroyo, and Vault 13, but he felt no particularly strong emotions about it. That was ancient history as far as he was concerned. It wasn't a part of his story.

"You look… nice," he volunteered. "Much pinker than you usually are at school." This was true, if not particularly eloquent. The fabric seemed to float around her like a cloud or the petals of a flower, and it contrasted well with her olive skin. He wondered if it was a pre-war garment or if someone had made it for her, but decided not to ask.

She laughed, and hooked her arm in his. "You look exactly as I thought you'd look. Thank you  _so_  much for coming tonight, Arcade. I didn't know who else to ask."

He doubted this - she had an extensive friend circle - but he didn't question the lie. So long as she understood that this was a one-time thing, he could relax and have a good time. They set off, and a hulking figure immediately started following them. Arcade was just reaching for a pistol that wasn't there when his date waved a hand airily behind her. "Arcade, this is Arnold. He's my bodyguard. One can't be too careful out here."

From his history lessons, Arcade knew that the  _nice_  part of Angeles had been reduced to so much irradiated rubble when the bombs fell, particularly after a secondary wave of fires had demolished much of what still stood in the aftermath. Only one part of the once-sprawling ritzy quarter remained. Now circled on every side by high walls, concertina wire, and armed guards, it was a self-contained city within a city, with its own store, primary school, playground, and police force. Arcade had never been inside the compound.

"Do you live here?" he asked Suzanne in astonishment as the guards at the gate waved them both in without a question.

She laughed. "No, don't be silly. My father's not  _that_  important. I have an uncle who can afford a house in here, but I've never been been more than a visitor. Such extravagance," she sighed as they passed by lush gardens and leaping fountains. "I  _do_  wish I could come more often."

Not  _all_  of the plants they passed were ornamental, Arcade was relieved to find - there were trees and berry bushes mixed in with the flowers, laden with fruits the identity of which he could only guess at. Had these sprung up in his neighborhood - even presuming they could take root there - they would have been stripped bare of fruit, leaves, bark, and wood within an hour. He wasn't used to seeing such unguarded plenty.

"One time," he began quietly, "I saw two children fighting over a dead rat. Winner won a meal." He didn't mention that one of the children had been him, or that his mother had wept when he carried it proudly home to give to her.

Suzanne had ducked aside to inhale the scent of a bunch of lilies and hadn't heard. "Sorry, what did you say?"

"Nothing." He willed himself to be courteous, even he couldn't be smooth. He was there as a guest and didn't need to shock or offend anybody; he'd say as little as possible, and go home happier for it.

If Suzanne was a visitor in the mayor's home, she was a well-liked one. She carried him from one side of the cavernous room to the other, greeting politicians, high-ranking military men, and glittering socialites by name. For the most part, their eyes slid over him with tolerant disinterest and said nothing beyond what was polite. Unused to so many introductions, he forgot their names almost instantaneously. He could almost see the assumption in their faces:  _One of Suzanne's toys._  Only one person - Aunt So-and-so, a grim, steely woman who wore plain, quality clothes and no jewelry at all - stopped to look at him a second time.

"And what do you do, young man?" she asked imperiously.

"I'm a medical student at the University." Not wanting to be disingenuous, he clarified. "At least I will be soon, once the semester starts."

She pursed her lips as if she'd tasted something bitter. "That whole place is run by the Followers of the Apocalypse. It gives them too much power over the intelligentsia, if you ask me. I've heard they make their members renounce NCR citizenship. Is that true?"

This was a common misconception and he hastened to correct her. "Ah… no, ma'am. While it's true that many members choose to avoid formal political categories to maintain neutrality, others are quite involved in public life."

"I hope  _you're_  not one of them."

"No," he said meekly. Then, without knowing why, he added, more boldly, "Well, not  _yet_. But I'm not a citizen either."

Suzanne exclaimed with surprise at this. "Oh,  _really_? How quaint."

The woman had another phrase in mind. "That's very disappointing. I expected a friend of Suzanne's to be interested in participating in our future rather than feeding off of it like one of those anarchistic leeches. I hope you reconsider. There are several fine government clinics in this city. You could go far with one of them."

Suzanne came to his rescue. "Auntie, don't go after him so. He's a perfect dear. A gentleman through and through. Come on, Arcade, there are more people I want you to meet…"

He went with her, looking back nervously to observe that "Auntie" was still glaring at him. "What does your aunt do, Suzanne?" he asked her.

A flash of annoyance came and went on her face as she reprimanded him. "Don't you know your own senator? She's up for reelection this year, and apparently I can't even ask you to vote for her.  _Really_ , Arcade, don't you want to be a part of what we're building here? Life isn't all books and philosophy - even the Followers know that."

Any reply he might have made was drowned out by another wave of introductions. Names, faces, handshakes came in a onrushing flood, and he found himself smiling and nodding like an idiot, feeling utterly out of place and inadequate to even the most basic social niceties.

Someone put a drink in his hand and he drank it to have something to do. It burned on the way down, but the sweetness made up for it. When his glass was empty, a footman appeared to replace it, then disappeared again. He sipped this one more slowly as he tried to follow the conversation of the person in front of him, a young man who seemed to be talking to Suzanne alone, trying to edge Arcade out of the picture.

"...and my father hired a full brass band - at  _great_  expense. We  _could_  have used a recording, but this is so much more grand." He addressed Arcade directly now. "How about  _you_? Have you ever heard music like this before?" By his smile, Arcade knew that he knew the answer already, and he hated the man a little. Still, he made himself answer civilly in the negative. Anything else he would have liked to say - that the Enclave had been flying when the other man's ancestors were still huddled in holes - was safety buried. But his pride needed a better response. Drawing his arrogance and contempt to himself like a shield, he systematically rejected the best of what the NCR had on display, silently keeping score for his own satisfaction.

Their nation? A pale copy. Men and women playing at government. These people didn't deserve the legacy they were trying to step into.

Their power? Their military force? Children picking up broken toys - some of them  _stolen_ toys - and trying to make them work.

Their fancy party? Needless, unconscionable waste. His disgust was born equally of personal hardship and twisted pride - the Enclave had never invested in beauty or extravagance, as far as he knew, and certainly not in his memory at the end of their era. But if they'd wanted something like this - the food, the flowers, the shining instruments - they could have had it, surely. Everything had been theirs for the taking, even the world and its people.

"Hey." Suzanne plucked at his sleeve, a little nervously. "Are you alright? You have a very unpleasant expression on your face." He assured her he was, and she smiled uncertainly. "Would you like to dance?"

He didn't, and also he didn't know how, but all he said was, "Okay," handing off his empty cup to one of the staff as she pulled him onto the floor.

She led him slowly through the steps, keeping a constant stream of whispers in his ear. "...to our left, that's General Grisham and his second wife - isn't she lovely? She's an absolute bitch. Behind me is my cousin Laura and her boyfriend.  _He_ ' _s_  one of the president's nephews, but let's not go over to them, alright? I'm not talking to her right now. Oh! I love this song. Let's go faster."

Finally, the band announced a break and the couples broke apart, speaking loudly and heading toward the spread the caterers had just finished laying out. Suzanne paused, looking up at him guiltily and straightening his collar for him. "Arcade, you don't really like me, do you? This was just a bit of fun?"

He froze, not knowing what to say, but fully aware that there was a wrong way to answer this question. Somewhere in the middle of him stammering out that she was a very nice girl, she stopped him, smiling broadly again. "That's alright, dear. I understand. Let's go get some food. I bet you're hungry."

To Suzanne's credit, she tried to make him comfortable. She pointed out delicacies he would have never dared to try and ordered him a glass of bubbly wine that was far more pleasant that anything he'd ever had before. He'd only read about champagne in books, and hadn't imagined that such things still existed. She found them a spot to sit near a group of her friends, but not so near the center that he would feel compelled to participate.

Invisible amid the chatter, Arcade had no obligation to do anything but eat, drink, and think. Full - really full - for the first time in a long time, he repented of his earlier train of thought, as if not being hungry made it easier to be level-headed. Just because he wanted nothing to do with the NCR didn't make the Enclave any better. It was stupid to compare the two, and foolish of him to cling to pride in a background he hated.

Ironically, "Auntie Senator's" open dislike had been some of the best career advice he'd received in a long time. She was right - he had no interest in the future that Aradesh and Tandi had created and that Peterson now tried to sustain. Just like Rundstrom had tried to tell him, all those years ago, the Followers were a third option. A neutral option. They wouldn't  _like_  where he came from - not that they would ever know - but they had also never caused him any pain or suffering. Feeling happier than he had for a long time, he went back for another refill.  _May as well enjoy it_ , he decided.  _I'll never find myself in a place like this again._

The night went on for far too long in this manner. Somewhere in the middle of one of his increasingly unsteady trips between his seat and the bar, he lost sight of Suzanne. An uncertain amount of time later, he spotted her dancing with someone else - the haughty young man who'd been so proud of the music. He tried to be upset, but could only manage amusement. Had she used him to make someone else jealous? Apparently. Did he care? No. He'd eaten and drunk his fill and gained an interesting experience - an epiphany, even. It occurred to him all the same that he ought to tell her dancing partner that it was alright, that he wasn't mad. "I have a girlfriend!" he'd say. No, that wasn't right. Maybe, "I have a boyfriend." No, that was too much - and it also wasn't true. He decided that he'd just wish the couple the best, grab a handful of snacks for the road, and go on his merry way, all obligations fulfilled.

Something went wrong as he tried to chart a course across the floor. He stepped on something soft and alive that squealed, then he tripped and stumbled into someone else. Apologizing, he then turned around too fast, looking for the splash of pink that was Suzanne, and blundered into someone else. "See here, boy…" someone began, and he caught a flash of Suzanne's embarrassed, indignant face before he was whisked away. The next thing he knew, he was being escorted - if that was the word for being dragged bodily - outside, away from the light, food, and music.

"I just wanted to tell her goodbye," he told the burly men when they deposited him on the steps. "Goodbye and thank you. She did me a big favor."

"We'll see that she gets your message," one of them said, before they left him, their laughter cut off by the closing door.

"Oh goody, another one who can't hold his liquor," came a dry voice from the street. "Climb in back and try not to fall on your head." Face burning with humiliation, Arcade crawled into the Brahmin cart and lay down, trying to get the contents of his stomach to stay put. He was focused so hard on this, that he didn't hear the man's question until he'd repeated it twice. "Where do you live? Tell me, or I'll just have the downtown patrol put you in the drunk cell for a few hours. I don't care who you are."

Arcade told him, forgetting that it was a secret.

Easy good humor gave way to surprise. "You're  _kidding_. Well, I'm not going in there, I'll tell you that for damn certain. But I'll get as close as I dare. What the hell is someone like you doing at a place like this?"

If he answered, he wasn't sure what he said - "sociological experiment," maybe - but the man didn't press the point. He clucked to his oxen and the cart rolled away. Only then, studying the spinning sky above, did Arcade remember his new resolution. "Can we stop at the Followers regional office first? I need to… do something there. Sign some papers. Make a vow."

There was a chuckle in the darkness behind him. "Nope. In the first place, that's not even close to being my job. In the second place, it's almost midnight on a Saturday and no one's going to be there. In the third place, you don't need to be making any decisions right now. Go sleep on it."

"I know what I want to do now," Arcade replied stubbornly. "I figured it out tonight."

"And what's that?" came the tolerant reply.

"I'm going to study to become a doctor. That's not new. A  _Followers_  doctor. That's the new part. And then I'm going to get as far from the NCR as I possibly can. There's nothing they have that I want. And besides, it's safer that way, don't you think?

"Sure, kid. Whatever you say. Jesus, why were you even  _there_?"

He wanted to explain everything to the kindly-seeming driver - about his father, and Navarro, and days spent at the beach with power armor - but the half-drowned voice of reason stopped him in time. Instead, he contented himself with reiterating his point again. "As far away as possible. That's where you'll find me. I'm going to make the world a better place and make up for some of the bad."

Weary of the disjointed conversation, the driver didn't respond, but Arcade smiled in satisfaction despite how sick the movement of the cart was making him. For all its awkwardness, tonight had been a... what do you call it? A watershed moment in his life. One of many. He could already see his future and it was fully his own. If he saw his father's friends again - if they returned from where they'd faded into the wastes - they'd be visitors from another life. If anyone brought up the Enclave in his presence, he could repudiate it without a shred of guilt. There was no reason why he would ever have to acknowledge it again. That was one secret he would never have to tell.


End file.
